This is the second part of last Thursday's adventure with The Boss’s mortgage company.

When I’ve assembled all the items they need, it’s a 36-page fax. Fine. I start the fax and the first 8 pages go through okay, but then I notice that the fax machine has grabbed five sheets at once. With my left hand, I grab the top pages that haven’t made it to the feeder, lift them off the machine and set them beside it on my credenza. With my right, I grab four of the sheets that are going through at once (all but the one which should be going through) and try to pull them out of the feeder without stopping the process. Once those are free, I start feeding them one sheet at a time through the feeder, which is a timing-tricky thing because you can’t let this fax machine suspect for a split second that there are no more pages or it will cease transmission, nor can I put more than one page in at once because, whether through greed or a desire to increase efficiency, it has discovered that it quite enjoys sucking several pages through at once.

I think I’ve timed it properly as all seems to be progressing, so I sit for a long time doing nothing but continuing to feed the remainder of the 36-page fax through, one sheet at a time. After the last page is scanned, I turn to another task and wait for my confirmation page to print. When it does, I discover that my timing was not good enough and the machine ceased transmitting after the original stuck page. It let me scan in 28 more pages, thinking I was going to punch in another fax number or an additional instruction like “copy”. When I didn’t do this quickly enough to suit it, which I didn’t because I didn’t know it was waiting for me, it cleared the document from memory. [Because my stinkin’ fax machine won’t just fax something, it has to scan it first, think it over and THEN send it. Maybe.]

So anyway, now I have to send the bulk of the fax again. Since I’m not 100% sure where it cut off (real page 8 or page 9 it thought was 8) I decide to send the entire fax a second time. I feed it page by page, having learned my lesson with the document feeder. It lets me scan in all 36 pages before it tells me, “No answer. Clearing document from memory.”

I begin the Fax From Hell a third time. I get 5 or 6 pages fed through when something goes awry between the time I start scanning and the time it starts dialing. Someone calls in on that number and the fax machine answers it, although I didn’t hear any ringing. Therefore, I’m startled and a bit disconcerted to hear a disembodied lady’s voice coming from the fax machine saying, “Hello? Hello? Are you there? Hello?” AAAAAAAGH!

I unplug the phone line and the fax machine, sit and sulk for a moment and decide to begin anew. This time, I succeed in connecting with the remote fax machine and in getting all 36 pages scanned through by feeding them one at a time. Heady with success, I turn to my desk to grab a ledger and do something productive. Perhaps I mentioned earlier that the fax machine sits on my credenza? When I turn, I clear the fed-through stack of paper, but the back of my chair does not. All 36 pages sprawl in an arc across the floor, some drifting several feet away.

I don’t know if you’ve ever examined the second page of a K-1 form, but it doesn’t say anywhere on that page what company it’s from, just the person to whom it’s directed. So I have 17 page twos and no idea which page ones they match. I have to pull all 17 tax returns, check the profit/loss, calculate that against The Boss’s percentage of ownership so I know, “Okay, for Company X I’m looking for a page two where the bottom line is X amount,” match them all up that way and then refile all 17 returns in their proper places, spending half the day doing something that should have taken a quarter of an hour, max.

And he wonders why, “Hey, would you fax this over to so-and-so?” is met with primal screaming.

MONTOYA DELENDA EST!