
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: SUNDAY, May 16, 1993                   TAG: 9305140412
SECTION: BUSINESS                    PAGE: D4   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: PAMELA MENDELS NEWSDAY
DATELINE:                                 LENGTH: Medium

FAX FEVER SWEEPS AMERICAN OFFICES

Fax addiction is fast overtaking our offices, a new Gallup survey says.

Regular fax machine users such as mail room personnel and office managers at Fortune 500 companies send an average of 49 documents a day, up from 40 just last year, the survey found. And the faxes they slip in the machines are getting longer. Last year, the documents averaged 4.6 pages; this year, 5.3.

And lest companies be concerned that lunchtime deli orders and interoffice rotisserie league stats are cluttering the fax flow, the survey found that purchase orders and reports were the documents most commonly sent and received.

The findings of the survey, paid for by office machine giant Pitney Bowes, are just further proof that fax machines are becoming an indispensable feature of office life, said Peter Dyson, editor of the Seybold Report on Desktop Publishing, a trade newsletter based in Media, Pa.

"It used to be that you could be in business with a telephone. Now you have to be in business with a telephone and a fax machine," he said.

The boom happened quickly. Fax machines have existed since at least the '60s. But it wasn't until the mid-'80s that improvements in technology - bringing down from six minutes to seconds the time it took to send a page - prompted a mushrooming of the machines.

The upside of fax fever is an effective, cheap and fast way to send information, said Richard A. Shaffer, principal at Technologic Partners, a New York-based technology consulting company.

The downside is an ever-quickening pace of office life. "The fax machine makes it impossible to say `The letter's in the mail,' " Shaffer said.

And in the cost-conscious '90s, office managers need beware on another score: A whopping 72 percent of fax machine users at Fortune 500 companies said they had no idea what it cost to send a fax.

(Answer: Typically, 15 to 18 cents a minute for long-distance transmission on a machine requiring 30 seconds per page.)

by CNB