It began with Quora. You know you are of some sort of distant generation if the social media platform that most appeals to you is one that consists entirely of asking and answering questions. I’m good at it. I pass 10,000 views a week and my upvotes are increasing rapidly as well. When I spent sometime reflecting on this and then discussing it with my computer engineering student son, I realized that the core of this enterprise for me is telling stories. Not fairy-tale, fictional stories, but real life, experiential, historical, educational stories. It was then that I knew that a blog would be an ideal channel for my skills as a raconteur. (ding-ding college word!)

My current occupation is family physician working as independent contractor. Though my knowledge and practice are of high quality, my ability to keep a job is not. I have come to the middle of my life wondering what I am going to do with it. Just to illustrate that I am not inflating my competence, I am board certified with medical licenses in good standing in two states. I have never been sued for malpractice, though most doctors would agree that sometimes this is a matter of luck than absence of actual irresponsible mistakes. However, I like to think that this is no accident — I spend a lot of time listening to and examining patients and then spend almost as much time exploring and determining diagnoses and effective treatments AND THEN I educate my patients about their health and the rationale for my treatment.

And then, of course, when I have spent a half hour doing this, I still have to document it all. It never goes as quickly as I wish it would. And after failing for the third time to keep up with employer expectations for efficiency and productivity, I am left now to figure out the next step.

But we have loads of time to talk about that. Too mundane to continue for now.

The title? The same engineering son I spoke of above often engages with me in remembering the evolution of technology through the past few decades. What never fails to amuse and amaze me are the people who cling to older versions of technology even though it is reasonably obvious that the new versions will be much easier to use. Fax machines represent one of my favorite examples. In the mid 1980’s I was in graduate school in theology. My part time job to pay my way through school consisted of driving for a delivery service company with the name “Errand Boy.” Yes, I recognize how sexist that title would be considered now. It was not unusual at that time for me to get surprised responses from workers I delivered to. A postal employee loved to refer to me as “Errand Broad.” Oh, that’s right — fax machines — this job predated the common use of theses automated typewriters that functioned much like the old fashion teletype. The earliest ones could not transmit pictures or anything that could not be reduced to line by line print. One of my runs involved driving to a Neiman Marcus department store to pick up the receipts for that day and then driving up to O’Hare to have them flown to Dallas for their accountants to review and process.

We’ve come a long way — even fax machines are on the way out, though it is still remarkable the amount of paper that comes through a physician’s office in the form of faxed medical records. More and more offices are transitioning to scanned or electronically stored records that they send as email attachments (with the obligatory signed release permissions included). I ran into one of the collisions that can occur when people are at different points in the technology spectrum. One medical office only did record transactions through email. The receiving office only handled their records through fax. I wound up acting as intermediary (these were my personal medical records). The first office sent them to me by email. I printed them out and then faxed them to the second office. Yes, I still own a fax. It sits in a remote corner of our house. Perhaps once or twice a year I hunt it down, dust it off, connect it to a phone line, and then hope I can remember how to operate it.

There is a reason that fax machines are being replaced by digital medium, and it has nothing to do with excessive use of paper — it is that the material they send is often flawed — blurred, cut-off text, overlapping illegible lines. I have a whole medical safety/mistake story that centers on a fax, but that is for another time.

The title. At the bottom of most faxed message is a page count. I presume it is a way of making sure one has received the entire document that was sent from the other end. One day I saw this page count: Page 4 of 3. I am not sure where the extra page became manifest, but there it was. So now I am hoping that this is what this blog can be . . . the page you were not expecting, the page that everyone else denies having sent or knowing it exists.

Get ready for page 4 of 3.