It sounds like the plight of one of my coworkers. He started on a team that had to know significant details about how dial up worked. This was great work when dial up was big. One aspect to dial up were fax calls, and nobody wanted to work those issues. He stepped up, learned fax, and earned quite a bit of notoriety due to his specific fax knowledge. Wrote a book, some RFCs, promotions, etc.
The only problem? He 10 years later he still sits around fax machines, listens to users who still use faxes (problem customers), and talks about one of the true dragging edges of technology. And it doesn't port well to other newer technologies.
> why fax is still being used; what problems fax solves.
You give someone a telephone number, then you hear a noise and a document magically appears.
Sure, there's software solutions. People can email documents to an email address, and your computer can automatically send it to the printer. Unless your computer is off, or the app isn't running, or someone queued up a hundred pages in the printer, or the printer is out of ink, or the person sends you a file in an incomrehensible file format.
These issues are all solvable, but it's less effort to buy a fax machine and plug it into a phone line.
The only problem? He 10 years later he still sits around fax machines, listens to users who still use faxes (problem customers), and talks about one of the true dragging edges of technology. And it doesn't port well to other newer technologies.