Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!

I am really enjoying life as a single gal (it's been 6 months now - how time flies :) but having a man about the house can sometimes have it's advantages....and this is one of those times!

I have an all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier which has worked perfectly - until this week. Admittedly, it is over 5 years old now but everything seems to be falling apart at once.

I haven't needed to use a fax for work for many years now. In the past, faxes have been sent to head office and then scanned and e-mailed to me. If I have needed to send a fax, I have e-mailed it to head office and it has been sent from there.

But for my current contract, I need a fax machine - no problem, I thought.....

However, try as I might, I couldn't get the fax machine to work. The phone was connected to the fax and the fax to the phone line, as per instructions but there was no dialling tone when I picked up the phone. So I bought a new phone (thinking that was the problem as it was a cordless phone) but the new phone didn't work either. After about an hour on a chatline with a man from hp, I gave up.

But lo and behold - I discovered Internet Fax Services! You get a fax number but it's all done via the internet. You send faxes by e-mail and faxes sent to your fax number are sent back to your e-mail address - BRILLIANT.............or is it??

I signed up to one of these services (first 30 days free!) and tested it out today. But when I scanned and sent a document, it arrived on my friend's fax zoomed in size so only a proportion of the document was printed out. And to top it all, my scanner has started adding an orange line all the way down the pages that I scan.

Oh woe is me! I am just not technical enough to sort these things out myself and the Internet Fax Service were not sure what was going on either. I sent them the document I was trying to fax so they could check it out but I'm not holding out much hope.

So tomorrow, I will be purchasing a new all-in-one printer/scanner/copier/fax and hope it all works.

I did have a bit of a panic this afternoon about all this. In the past, my ex would have been there to help me out. I was suddenly feeling quite vulnerable and lost and useless. So I did what I know I needed to do at this moment - I phoned a friend :-) My lovely pal, Craig, has said that of course, he can help me out over the weekend.

Friends - what on earth would we do without them :-)