URGENT!

Part of my job is to retrieve all faxes off of the fax machine, check for docketing items and forward them to the people who need them. We receive hundreds of faxes each day and a lot of the faxes we receive have the word URGENT across the top. As you can guess, 99% of those so-called urgent faxes are not urgent.

Most of them are barely necessary at all, let alone urgent and when you receive as many faxes as we do, the cover page is of little importance and it doesn't make me look at the fax any quicker than any other fax. This is a direct result of the URGENT fax senders who cry wolf.

This presents a dilemma for these perpetual URGENT fax senders. What do you do when you have a truly URGENT fax which, by my definition is anything that requires some sort of action either immediately (ergo, the term urgent) or within the hour.

Most of the URGENT abusers resort to writing the word urgent in huge letters with a thick marker. I suggest they get more creative and offer the following suggestions:

• URGENT: Read this or you'll be fired.
• URGENT: Okay, the last time wasn't so urgent but this time I really, really mean it. Really.
• URGENT: Urgently, urgent!
• URGENT: Free donuts to first 10 people who respond.
• URGENT: Don't make me show them the pictures. (You know the ones I mean.)