Faxlore

Like email and chain letters, office technology has given new life to various forms of practical jokes, urban legends, and folklore.

The items are often office-related, such as spoof agenda for meetings, spurious descriptions of ridiculous training programs that all staff will allegedly be required to attend, and so on.

[3] The semi-traditional lists of reasons "why a cucumber is better than a man" or "why a beer is better than a woman" often circulate as faxlore, as has the well known mock German variations of the "Blinkenlights" poster.

Another commonly circulated text contains ethnic humor; a typical version goes: Heaven is where the police are British, the lovers French, the mechanics German, the chefs Italian, and it is all organized by the Swiss.

Hell is where the police are German, the lovers Swiss, the mechanics French, the chefs British, and it is all organized by the Italians.Materials of this sort have existed from the beginnings of duplicating technologies.

Cartoons and other amateur materials were distributed in the workplace, usually in violation of managerial restrictions on the use of office supplies, and often in disregard of copyright law.

The use of a fax machine to duplicate these materials also changed the emphases of their subjects; various alarms and urban legends were propagated to distant readers over the telephone lines.

[7] On the authority of these anonymous, hard-to-trace, and impossible-to-cross-examine sources, school administrators sometimes acted to ban the wearing of Stars of David and similar symbols of minority religions.