IT Guys & Phone Lines | We're Out of the Book and Doing Fine

It’s a glorious Sunday, January 17^th and I’m reporting in from 39,000 feet over the American west, I’m on Delta (again) heading to Chattanooga for a 5 day Pilates Excel workshop, plus 2 days of guest teaching, plus 1 day of open house hosting and Master Class teaching. The sun is bright, the Rockies are stunning, almost unbelievably gorgeous and everything from around 5,000 feet and lower is socked in with dense fog which looks like ultra white gauze. God is great and so are you! I digress.

About 2 years ago, I discontinued land line telephone service which I’d had with Qwest since opening the studio back in 2001. I was able to keep the same 2 phone numbers, one which had been published and was custom to include the acronym of the name of the studio (Pilates Powerhouse NW, 206-525-PPNW) and the other which was unpublished and was used as a dedicated fax line. Back in the day, faxes were quite common and it was unthinkable that a business wouldn’t have a dedicated line just for faxes.

Speaking of faxes, back in 2003 I began receiving legal notices in the mail that I was eligible to join a class action suit against a junk faxer who'd been caught and, loving the futility of it all and having wasted cases of paper to junk faxes over the years, I jumped right in.  Every 6 months or so, I'd get a request in the mail to reconfirm my business information - address, phone numbers, ownership, etc., and for all these years, I've just kept on filling out whatever they sent.  Right before Halloween last year, I received a five hundred dollar check in the mail representing my portion of the settlement against those evil spam faxers.  The court documents included with the check said that the spammers had sent faxes to my fax line twice, both in the summer of 2001.  I haven't taken the time to call the lawyer who tried the case to find out why my portion of the settlement was so high but the only thing I can figure is that so few people kept up with the infrequent but consistent requests for confirmation that by the time the thing was litigated, the survivors to the litigation were generously rewarded.