Ugh. I have hated faxes since the fax machine was born. Made even worse by the comedy, Office Space (oh, I've done my share of fax-busting, Casino-style), the dreaded fax is dead.

Or so I thought.

Starting this business has brought my hatred of the fax machine to the forefront, again. Ahem.

I really hoped that my hate affair with fax machines ended when I killed my last fax machine. Remember that crummy paper? Well, that was gone, but they still just sucked…until a couple of years ago when I went "faxless."

Most people want to go paperless. I just wanted to go faxless.

But no more. The dreaded fax reared its ugly head today when I discovered that there were only 2 ways to submit my Chamber of Commerce membership application – via mail or via fax.

Are you freaking kidding me?

Irony: The local Chamber of Commerce has no electronic means of accepting an application. That, in a word, is stupid. And greedy. I don't know how much it costs to run a Chamber, but I just paid $277 for a membership. You'd think with 800 member companies that they could afford a secure server or at the very least a secure online application (like box.net) that you could send your documents to.

Nope. None of that.

So I went to my tried-and-true electronic-fax-sending whiz bang online application, box.net. They use eFax to send faxes. Only now they don't. At least they don't for free. They used to.

In theory, it's simple: Scan the document you want to fax, upload to box.net, right click on the file and voila! choose eFax.

Only eFax wasn't listed any more. It's a "premium upgrade." Sure. Whatever.

Then I tried faxzero.com. Snazzy. Upload, enter in contact details. Send. Wait for email confirmation. Click the link. Wait.

I got a "cannot send fax" message. WTF?

Then I tried GotFreeFax.com. It is nearly identical to faxzero.com.

Except that it works!

Yippee!!!

Long story short: I will now use GotFreeFax.com. It's super simple and it works. And it's free.

(I know, free in this case cost me time. I could have saved time by taking out my wallet. But my disdain for faxes and fax machines and paid-for services that used to be free with no announcement of the change totally pisses me off.)