Everybody has a nemesis. A dark mirror of yourself, a challenge that is everything you hate. If you've ever worked tech-support, you know what that is: printer issues.
I'm Anonymous, and you last saw me in the case of The Ghost Cursor. This is my story.
As the days marched on, the chill in the air turned from bracing to painful. God had hoofed it down to Florida for the winter, and this year, he'd stolen Hope away with him. Between leaden skies and dirty slush, gale-force winds sent snow tearing down city streets to sandblast one and all into their constituent atoms.
In that timeless slog, one year ended and another began, barely noticed. The short days and bitter cold made my foot-and-bus commute almost unbearable. Only the promise of warmth and caffeine at the other end got me through. A cup of joe at my desk, then a glance at my caseload, something I approached with a weird mix of curiosity and dread.
That morning, a fresh ticket had just come my way: The new printer in HR keeps printing gibberish.
Another printer. Why was it always printers? I dialed up the source, a guy named Tony, and made my introductions. “What do you mean by 'gibberish?'”
“It'd be easier to show you in person,” Tony replied, his voice jittery. “Could you stop by my cube right away?”
“Sure thing.”
I hung up, tossed the last dregs of coffee down my throat, and stood from my chair. At the same moment, a slight silver-haired woman made tracks down the open passageway a few feet away from me. She clutched her laptop and a stack of folders to her chest, making a beeline toward who-knew-what.
My first pleasant surprise of the day. I couldn't help calling out to her. “Aggie! How's it goin'?”
When I'd first gotten my start in Tech Support, Agnes Shaw had been one of the department's top reps. She knew every system quirk, every trick to pull, every right thing to say to leave a smile on someone's face. I'd come up under her wing, sought her advice a million times.
And then they'd offered Aggie a promotion, with a fancy title and salary to boot. She'd taken it.
That was years ago, now. I wasn't her direct report, so I only caught glimpses of her now and then. It was a shame.
Aggie halted in her tracks, dazed and startled, before looking my way. A second later, she smiled. “Hello! Doing just fine, yourself?”
“Same as ever.” But my spirits had lifted. Knowing there was no time to waste, I darted over to conversational distance. “You're a hard one to get ahold of.”
She shrugged her shoulders with a wistful expression.
“Why don't we step out for a smoke?” It seemed like we both needed it. “When are you free?”
“Not today. Meetings all day.” Aggie glanced askance. “It's not appropriate for me to go out there, anyway. You need a place where you can vent freely.”
“Spoken like a true manager,” I scolded with a smirk. “Listen, we haven't caught up in ages. Could we step out for coffee sometime?”
A warm glow peeked through her distraction. “I'd like that! Find an open spot on my schedule and book it, OK? I gotta run!” With a look of apology, Aggie backed away and rushed down the passage flanked by cubicles and filing cabinets.
Aggie made these offers all the time. Then, just before the appointed hour, something always came up that required a rain check. Well, I didn't care. I darted back to my desk, woke up my sleeping machine, and pulled up the office calendar to request a meeting the next day, right when I usually needed a dose of caffeine to make it through an otherwise endless afternoon. It was on Aggie to confirm or reschedule.
Meanwhile, I had a date with HR.
Human Resources. Normally, those words gave me an instant case of the willies. Μost of the people there were the sort of drones who couldn't hack Accounting or Finance in business school. But Leila … Leila was different. I couldn't help thinking about her. Back when I'd fielded a support ticket up in C-Town, an issue caused by the very CEO who'd filed the ticket, Leila had helped me keep my head attached to my neck. It seemed like maybe, just maybe, she really did want to improve this sorry joint the way she claimed.
I entered the nearest stairwell and plodded down a couple flights of concrete steps. Within those narrow confines, I brought myself back to reality. Leila was one executive among dozens on the org-chart. She wouldn't have a blessed thing to do with a low-level case like this. I had to stay on my toes in HR, no matter what friends I thought I'd made.
I pushed open the stairwell door and entered a carpeted space lined with filing cabinets, supply closets, and office machines. Sharp florescent lighting revealed an older man in a tailored suit only a few feet away, frowning as he took a hair dryer to the insides of a large printer that'd seen better days and now begged for oblivion.
As the stairwell door swung shut behind me, I froze. No matter how many years you piled up in this joint, it never ran out of new things to throw at you. This had to be the printer I was there to fix—more like save from yet another abusive higher-up who'd require kid-glove handling.
First things first. I had no idea if I'd gotten there in time to save the printer, but damned if I wouldn't try. Like a lifeguard diving in after a drowning victim, I rushed over to the outlet where the hair dryer was plugged in. Adding to the insanity, it was the wrong sort of outlet for a hair dryer, which needed a GFCI to run safely. I ripped the plug from the outlet and threw it aside.
The roar of the dryer faded, leaving stunned silence in its wake.
Burning with righteous fire, I spun around to face the perp. The HR big-shot faced me, too, brandishing his hair dryer like a revolver. Wide-eyed passersby fringed the scene like extras in a B-Western.
Kicking anything or anyone when they were down was the sort of thing that stabbed through my armor of veteran cynicism, riling me up with righteous anger. But an outburst would only make things worse. For the good of all, I swallowed it, forcing a polite lie past gritted teeth. “Just wanted to make sure you could hear me, sir.”
Like hell.
“Tech Support,” I introduced myself. “This the printer that ain't working?”
Hothead's glaring frustration shifted away from his victim, toward me. “Yes, and I've had it! It must be moisture inside the machine.”
God, help me. Oh, right: Florida.
“Good thinking, sir,” I said. “But I'm less worried about moisture and more worried about melting sensitive electronics with all that heat.”
His eyes went wide, like the notion had never entered his brain.
Slowly, I knelt to pick up the hair dryer's plug. Unchallenged, I rose and started winding the power cord around my left hand, inching closer to him in the process. Once I was standing in front of him, I proffered the wire bundle.
“Hold onto that for me, sir, if you don't mind.” Phrasing things as favors made them go down smoother. Now to dig up a workaround that would get this guy out of everyone's hair. “Is there some other printer you can use for now?”
His open hand clamped over the wire as his expression soured. “Yes, but it's a pain to walk over there!”
“I understand, sir. It's something. Don't worry about this one. I'll take it from here.”
Hothead walked off without another word. The spell broke; the onlookers found places to be.
With relief and dread, I approached the printer, fearing I'd be performing last rites. But as I checked it over inside and out, I found an incredible lack of melted parts. When I plugged it in and started it up, everything loaded just fine. Using the printer's onboard interface, I performed every available test print. They all worked.
Snatched from Death's doorstep. “Hang in there,” I muttered, patting the machine's plastic case. “I'm doing everything I can.”
Like making sure Leila got an earful about this. Later.
Before leaving the scene, I had a good look high and low. Ceiling tile and carpet were clean. No leaks, no spills. Even the heated indoor air lacked enough water molecules to give Hothead or anyone else the idea that “excess moisture” might've been the problem. Time to chase down the ticket-holder and see if the problem was already resolved.
A couple of passersby pointed me toward a distant corner of HR, where I found a cube-desk buried under reports, folders, and other well-intentioned clutter. A man was sitting in an office chair facing the cube's entrance, squeezing a rubber stress ball.
“You Tony?” I entered the cube, offering my hand.
He stood, shook, then immediately returned to the reassurance of his toy. “Sorry. My boss is, uh, tough like that.”
“Hothead's your boss? Jesus. He almost single-handedly iced that printer. Well, maybe 'iced' ain't the word for it.” I folded my arms. “You know who's gonna hear about it? The new head of HR. When I close this ticket, I'll drop her a line about what happened.”
Tony's eyes went wide. “Really? Thank you! I know I'm supposed to go up the chain, but …” He edged closer, lowering his voice. “Sometimes it's the chain that's the problem, y'know?”
Something I'd run into only a million times. “I know. Can't do much about it most of the time, but I can here, so I will.”
Tony nodded. “Thanks again.”
“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.”
“Can you try printing now?” I asked. “Let's see what happens.”
Later that morning, I stopped by the usual smoke-break spot between office buildings. As wind and snow coursed through the alley, I recapped the morning's events for my friends Megan and Reynaldo. Then I pulled a stack of folded-up paper from my trench coat pocket, splitting it in half to hand them several pages apiece. At last, I dug through my pockets for my sorely-needed cigarettes and lighter. While I carefully shielded the lighter's flame from the wind to light the cigarette clenched in my teeth, they studied the printouts with looks that quickly turned baffled.
”I don't feel safe working with Cheryl?” Reynaldo read aloud.
”John keeps staring at me in the break room. I've told him twice.” Megan's eyes found mine. “What the hell? Every print request does this?”
“Every print job except for test prints,” I replied. “We're lucky the poor thing starts up at all after Hothead gave it the salon treatment.”
Megan smirked, handing back her pages before hugging herself against the cold. “Sounds to me like it might be a network issue.” She glanced Reynaldo's way for confirmation.
Our veteran network admin was too busy frowning at the stack of paper he rifled through to notice. “What have you tried?” he asked me.
I helped myself to a long, warming drag. “The printer already spent some time turned off and unplugged.” Hothead had seen to that. “Since it's old, figured I'd reinstall the drivers, clear the print queue. Didn't help.” I shrugged. “Megan's right. Since it doesn't happen with test prints, it seems like something fishy's happening when the print requests coming through the network.”
Reynaldo frowned in thoughtful silence for a while, then glanced between us. “Do you remember that system for submitting HR complaints anonymously through the intranet?”
Forcing my brain-pointer back into memory spaces I usually steered clear of, it came back to me a little, through a thick fog. “Few years back? Before your time,” I added for Megan's benefit. “Never paid it much mind. Never really believed those gripes would actually be anonymous.”
“Yeah, that's crazy!” Megan said. “Who would trust that?”
I hefted the printouts she'd returned to me, each page loaded with more beef than a Texas ranch. “That's who.”
“They retired that program ages ago,” Reynaldo said. “The server was decommissioned—at least, so I thought.” He dropped his cigarette butt to the slush-covered asphalt and crushed it underfoot, sighing heavily with a knowing look. “Let's go trace some IPs.”
“Swell!” I was about to grind my partially-smoked cigarette against the brick wall behind me to save it for later when I caught the hopeful look in Megan's eye.
“Can I help, too?” she asked.
What fool would say no?
“We may need a good developer at that,” I said. “C'mon!”
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