Our admins sent me the following to explain a system abort:

This is a known problem with HP's network software. If a job is being
spooled to a network printer at network shutdown the software may cause a
system abort, or at network startup if a job starts to spool to a network
printer before the network is completely up this could cause the problem.
There are no fixes at this time. The work around is to set the outfence to
14 to keep any jobs from going to any printers at network startup and
shutdown. The SR# for hp is 5003426098.

I hope I am not just wasting bandwidth posting this. I've convinced myself
that posting this justifies asking the following simple question that I
could probably find the answer to with a few minutes' reading. Our backup
procedures involve two jobs that run more or less together, then a job to
take down the network and so on before backup, then a backup job, and then
the job to bring up the network. Only the first pair of jobs print their
STDLists to a class of networked printers. I want to have the next job
detect that those STDLists are printing, and wait for them to finish.
However, I do not want to wait indefinitely if one of the printers has an
error such as simply being out of paper. What are some good ways to
accomplish this? Or should I be happy with the suggested work around?