It's the classic "and everyone clapped" story.

I get that this is exhausting, but the rank-and-file employee is just doing their job. This is like people attacking McDonalds employees because they were out of Szechuan Sauce [0].

The author _clearly_ had a way to accomplish their goal. Why could they not just say "ok that's inconvenient, but I'll just use this online service to send my existing PDF".

[0]: https://www.nme.com/features/tv-features/rick-and-mortys-sze...

Unplug fax, no one gets benefits that day, simple fix and the office's day just got a little easier. What was already printed goes in the shred bin.

Non-consumer printers are also pretty good! I used to teach 120 students, so printing out materials for all of them for a week would sometimes be 1,000+ pages. 500 pages? I can't picture that causing problems for any org that needed to print things regularly.

And toner? I'd wager that the printer is going to use a print drum. That does have toner inside, but you'd talk about replacing the drum–not running out of toner.

Even consumer drum printers are pretty good nowadays. I have a Brother drum printer, and I wouldn't worry about sending a 500 page job to it if I needed to.

https://help.brother-usa.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/183926/...

It's very likely, even in some smaller local governments, that the "Fax" doesn't do any printing at all. Digital faxing has been a staple of bureaucracy for decades.

So it doesn't inconvenience the "Karen" who is supposedly so evil for (checks notes) following the laws or rules that were implemented by people who were voted into their position.

Unlike in the private sector, public sector employees are often literally constrained by the law. You can personally end up in court if you try to help someone bypass a law. Plenty of government employees DO still end up bending rules.

Karen has zero power. If she did, she wouldn't be talking to assholes on the phone all day every day.