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Admin
Don't tell, the IP address is reused and the protocol used for the complaints just happens to be accepted as print requests. Someone keeps submitting what they think are HR complaints but are actually print requests.
Admin
I was going to write a grouchy comment about how I'd love to trade long tangents about our protagonist trying to catch up with random people that never come up again for the actual resolution, but it kind of works in a meta way, like the story was printed by the faulty printer
Admin
Where's the punchline? Where's the WTF? Was it the air dryer thing? That much to read for just "someone blew hot air into an old printer"?
Admin
The punchline is that it's an IP configuration issue. The old server for complaints supposedly happens to have the same IP as the printer and the form supposedly just happens to work as a print request leading to the submissions being printed. And this being HR they naturally treat it as printing gibberish as that is how they treat complaints.
Of course, this is all completely unrealistic. Even if such an IP clash did happen the odds that what ever system is in question would just happen to generate print requests is... just no.
And of course everyone knows HR reads all your messages. Even the ones you don't send to them. They would newer ignore something like this. That is their job as corporate gestapo.
Admin
Not totally unrealistic. Maybe there was a server that hosted a web form where employees could "anonymously" enter complaints, to be sent to HR. That server was not decommissioned, but simply forgotten, but some people maybe had it bookmarked or remembered its name or address. Now this server generates print requests and sends them to a specific host name or IP. The article says:
“Don't mention it. Anyway, the printer. Your ticket said it was new? Looks pretty darn old to me.”
“It's new over here,” Tony explained. “They just it brought down and set it up for us.”
We can assume that this particular printer has been the HR anonymous complaint printer. So the printer either had a statically configures IP, or by DHCP, it got the same IP it had before at its old location (same MAC - same IP). And that's why it still could receive its "surprising" print jobs, and it would of course print them, along with its (now) normal workload.
Of course, everything a user, be it in HR or elsewhere, doesn't expect, is to be categorized as "gibberish", same concept as "doesn't work", "is broken", "can't find my" and the like.