Back to the future. I was going to title this post “who remembers the fax?” but even I thought that was going to be a little hard for SEO…

I’m trying to remember where in the saga I got to last week.

Only one thing for it – go and refresh my mind.

Read the !*!* blog, not get a beer out although that would probably be preferable.

It’s been a few steps forward and no steps back sort of week which is good.

But the mental effort expended to get to today has not made my stress levels any easier.

Who remembers the film? Or are you all too young? Image byrnswaelz from Pixabay

UK house sale did duly get over the line. Only SEVEN MONTHS from offer to completion.

Anyone would think solicitors had other “stuff” to do rather than complete (excuse the pun) the work they’ve already got.

But it seems to be a Covid thing.

I’ve been telling all and sundry my tales of tardiness and woe, mostly to nodding heads and people agreeing everything seems to take so much longer than pre-Covid.

Back to the future maybe?

Certainly not, I have no recollection of our earlier property transactions taking anything like as long.

Mind you, every one of them did my head in so nothing changes there…

And the bank balance was indeed somewhat more robust than it has been of late.

So. Tick in the box?

Yup but that was the easy bit.

Have you tried moving any monies from your bank account in excess of your daily limit lately?

No? Nor had we.

So eventually Lorraine gets to talk to the right person at our UK bank to be told that you can go into a branch and make the transaction.

Which may be a touch more difficult than it need be with the bank in one country and us in another.

So she points this out and luckily they have a mechanism for exactly this situation.

We can write the instruction on paper and fax it to them (hence the title I didn’t use above).

Hands up anyone who has used a fax in the last twenty years?

I imagine a whole cohort of employees have grown up who have never even heard of them let alone sent one.

I tried it at my networking meeting this morning and very few had done so in the last decade and many not in the twenty years too.

When was the last time I faxed someone?

Tuesday.

This Tuesday.

Back to the future…

For those of you too young to have come across the fax, that nice Wikipedia has a good article.

I’m interested to note that the UK NHS, Japan and large corporations seem to be the main groups still using faxes.

So, fax drafted, redrafted and printed and signed by ourselves.

Lorraine had (she thought) ascertained that her scanner app also has a fax function.

Which, when you clicked on it, took you to the App Store and made you download a separate app which you then found you couldn’t actually send anything with unless you paid for it.

Which seemed a bit cheeky. Back to the future.

So we looked for another app with a good rating, downloaded that and found that it wanted money to use it too.

But it was £1.00 cheaper than the first.

So, okay, grit your teeth, pay the dosh and vow to cancel the monthly payment the minute we had successfully sent our fax.

Only to find that you cannot contact a UK number starting with 08 from outside the UK.

Once it didn’t work, something in the dark recesses of my mind reminded me of this. You have to have an STD code (which is nothing to do with sexually transmitted diseases and all to do with Subscriber Trunk Dialling). Area codes to people in a lot of other countries.

Nearly got that completely wrong. Strictly two-thirds wrong as I did get the ‘D’ correct.

But the spellchecker didn’t have dialling with two ‘l’s because that’s the UK spelling not the US.

So?

A flash of inspiration. Could Lorraine’s other employer who is in the UK fax it for us if we scanned it and emailed it to them?

And yes they could. But they weren’t sure at first whether it still worked or not.

All sorted?

Well no, really.

Just the start of the process in fact. Booked the currency that this payment would cover only to have to go through major hoops with the currency people to prove I wasn’t money laundering.

And that was that?

You are pulling my whatsit are you not?

Because several hours later I still hadn’t had the email saying that the currency trade had been settled.

So Lorraine phones up and finds out that, yes they have received it (the fax) and will action it that afternoon.

Which of course they do but too late for the currency people to do their bit the same day.

And so it eventually goes out the following morning.

Job done?

I wish!

I notify our solicitor out here that it’s on its way and she responds saying she will confirm when they received it.

That was yesterday morning.

Now we’ve never done anything like this before, certainly nothing of this scale.

So we both had a restless night’s sleep.

I seem to recollect that it took a couple of days for the deposit to get there but, conversely, a test transfer to our Spanish bank arrived within minutes.

But it doesn’t stop you feeling anxious though. I suspect another restless night tonight.

It doesn’t leave me time to talk about healthcare, non-delivery of beer and the like.

Just time do do mi espanol and plough (not in the spellchecker!) through today’s emails before what might be a somewhat subdued evening out.

Back to the future…