Every office has one. The mysterious figure who haunts the copier corner like a ghost from 1997. While the rest of us are slacking, syncing, cloud-sharing, and PDF-signing into the digital age, he’s printing. Constantly. Endlessly. Aggressively.
Meet The Office Printer Guy—the last living disciple of the Church of Hard Copies.
Chapter 1: A Print Job Is Not Just a Print Job
To you, a print job might be a rare ritual performed for HR onboarding forms or the once-a-decade emergency PowerPoint backup. But to Printer Guy, printing is life. It’s an art form. A religion. A daily performance.
He doesn’t just send something to the printer. No. He announces it:
“Just printed out the Q2 deck—figured I’d read it on paper, you know? Easier on the eyes.”
No one asked. No one cares. Yet somehow, everyone knows. Because he makes eye contact when the printer fires up like he’s launching a rocket.
Chapter 2: He’s Printing Your Emails
Don’t be alarmed if you see him strolling to the printer holding your Slack thread. He’s printed it. For “documentation.”
Yes, Printer Guy is the reason IT had to put up a sign saying “Please do not print entire email chains.” He still prints them. He prints things that were never meant to be printed. Things that physically suffer in print.
HTML-formatted emails. Zoom screenshots. 97-slide pitch decks. Your memes from the team chat. All flattened onto paper like roadkill.
Chapter 3: The Stack
He walks around with a stack. You know the one. Thick enough to stop a bullet. Mysteriously uncollated. Held with both hands like sacred scrolls.
The Stack isn’t for reading—let’s be clear. It’s a prop. A flex. A symbol of ancient workplace power. Like a medieval scroll that says: “I am busy. I have important things. You should fear me.”
Fun fact: Printer Guy hasn’t actually read a printed page since 2012. But he’ll flip through them during meetings, nodding solemnly as if the ink itself holds executive secrets.
Chapter 4: Printer Whisperer
No one else knows how to fix the office printer. But Printer Guy? He speaks fluent HP. He knows which tray is jammed just by the sound. He opens panels you didn’t know existed. He carries toner like it’s a newborn.
And yet… the printer never quite works for him either.
“Ugh. It’s doing that thing again,” he says, slapping it lovingly. “Let me just override the spooling buffer.”
We don’t know what that means. We never will.
Chapter 5: The Environmental Hypocrisy
Printer Guy’s desk has a succulent, a reusable water bottle, and a “Go Green!” sticker on his monitor.
He prints 300 pages a day.
There is no recycling bin near his desk. There is only The Pile: a monument to paper, held together by passive-aggressive Post-it notes and the faint hope that someday, someone will want a printed copy of the company mission statement.
They won’t.
Chapter 6: Why?
We’ve asked ourselves this question many times. In Slack. In whispered conversations in the break room. In the quiet moments when we hear the printer warming up… again.
Why is he like this?
Here are some theories:
He doesn't trust screens. "They change things on you."
He once lost a file in the cloud and never recovered emotionally.
He genuinely enjoys the tactile experience of paper. (A serial killer trait.)
He thinks someone, somewhere, is going to ask for a printed copy of everything.
He simply… doesn’t know how to stop.
Chapter 7: The Final Print
Someday, the printer will die. A dramatic paper jam will take it out of commission forever. IT will wheel it out like a fallen comrade. The office will cheer. The trees will rejoice.
And Printer Guy?
He’ll stand in the empty copier corner, eyes misting over, holding a highlighter and nothing to highlight.
Then, like a phoenix rising from the ashes of uncollated paper, he’ll whisper:
“I guess I’ll just fax it.”
So, next time you hear that familiar grind and whir from the office corner, give a silent nod to The Office Printer Guy.
He may be stuck in 2003, but by the gods, he’s committed.
Have a story of an office printer guy of your own? Tell us in the forum! And please, don’t print it out.
