The Fax Machine That Spoke in Moos
A loan document gets faxed to my barn office and, thanks to a line noise and a curious calf, comes back sounding exactly like a cow.
We were the last dairy in Erath County to hold on to a fax machine, mostly because my lender liked it and I was too stubborn to argue. It sat in the corner of the barn office under a feed store calendar, and it made noises that scared the young calves. They would stand in the doorway and stare at it when it rang.
One afternoon, the bank sent over a final set of loan documents, nineteen pages long. The machine started up with its usual screech and began feeding the paper out slowly, and a little Jersey calf named Biscuit came to investigate. She put her nose right up to the speaker and made her calf noise, a high thin bleat, at the exact moment the line connected.
I did not know a phone line could carry a sound like that, but it can. Back at the bank, my loan officer was standing by the machine on her end, and she told me later that the first page came through with a long wavering moo stamped across the top in faint gray ink. She held it up to the light and called her colleagues over to look.
There was a long silence on the telephone while she studied the page. Then she said, 'Mr. Birdwhistle, did you sign this with a hoof?' I told her no, that was an accidental attachment, and that the calf was my chief of operations. She asked if I would like to resend the page. I said I would take a moment, but that the calf had her heart set on being a notary.
We resent it the second time with the door shut. The loan closed on schedule, and the bank kept the moo page in a frame in the break room. I am told it has become something of a tradition to read it aloud at the holiday party. If you ever want to learn how rural lenders think about paperwork, the FSA farm loan pages spell out the real forms, and none of them need a calf. For the calf version, see farm.FM.
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