In this case though, I don't know how someone gets the ability, training, and access to forward a printer to a public IP and publish it to their devices to where it would show up on other machines. That kind of shit only happens if you're both IT Director and Help Desk Attendant.

Well allow me to explain. This was at a small shitty hotel, a lot of these places don't actually have any real IT, they just have contracts with vendors for each individual system, well some of them at least. So how do they manage their networks you might ask? Well that's the thing, they don't, at one point someone set up a router and switch for their computers, but since then the property has gone through 3 different management companies and by the time it got to the current one nobody had been given access to the router or switches, but hey the computers still have internet so whatever.

Now one current contract all these hotels do always have is for their guest network, and of course they have a router and generally a small block of public IPs available. So in this case, at least my best guess, is they called into the MSP (us) that only has RMM agents on their PCs, and a list of a few vendors, and asked to get a new printer setup. So having no way to setup a new device on the admin network, they called up the guest network vendor and asked for a port to plugin to and IP, the vendor said sure and spun up an port on their gateway no questions asked, then they just plugged in the printer and set it static to the public IP provided. Then the helpdesk guy simply remotes into the computers in the back office and clicks add printer and types in the IP, voila, it works.