You might say that

IT site manager pilot fish at this big manufacturer gets a call from an engineer -- who's frantic.

"He said he was sending some engineering drawings to his plotter that he needed for an upcoming presentation, but nothing was printing out," says fish. "Could I please investigate and fix the problem right away?"

Fish checks the printer queue on the server. Everything looks OK in terms of the printer description, and the print spooler service is started. But documents are indeed stuck in the printer queue.

So fish drops what he's doing and heads across the corporate campus to the engineer's office, so he can check the plotter itself to see if it's a hardware issue.

But everything seems to check out.

The IP address on the plotter is correct. It matches the IP address on the printer queue.

All printer cartridges appear to be full and functional.

The paper is loaded properly.

Fish is just making sure that the network cable is securely connected when the user interrupts him. "Is this cord that we inadvertently cut when we were moving furniture around significant?" he asks.

"Naturally, it was the Cat-5 cable," fish sighs. "I replaced the cable, and the plotter started printing all queued documents."

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