Hard Copy Quotes

“Every office worker is just a little puppet, and when the puppet breaks or gets mangled in the machinery gears, well, that’s no problem at all for the office system. The office is really just a machine like me, its staff easily replaceable components. People tend to overestimate their own value and importance, but I understand that this is crucial for the employee’s psychological motivation. Only if they feel this way will they show up for work, day in, day out.”
― Fien Veldman, Hard Copy

“because if you don’t agree often enough with the person you’re talking to, there’ll be trouble. People will think you’re a threat. They won’t trust you. Every woman knows this. Take Lucia de B. for instance, the nurse who didn’t smile or chat with her colleagues enough: people were immediately convinced she’d murdered seven patients. Seven! To think you can get a life sentence for being socially awkward.”
― Fien Veldman, Hard Copy

“Everybody wants to be more than just a cog in the machine, and office people like to uphold the idea that they are indeed more than that, that they aren’t just working on an assembly line with a spanner in their hand. But I have been here for a long time, and I can tell them: if that’s what they think, they are, unfortunately, incorrect. Every office worker is just a little puppet, and when the puppet breaks or gets mangled in the machinery gears, well, that’s no problem at all for the office system. The office is really just a machine like me, its staff easily replaceable components. People tend to overestimate their own value and importance, but I understand that this is crucial for the employee’s psychological motivation. Only if they feel this way will they show up for work, day in, day out.”
― Fien Veldman, Hard Copy

“No, it’s about that whole little world back there. The atmosphere. The strange thing is she misses the possibility it held, the possibility of people destroying other people if they wanted to. She would rather operate in that world than in the world to which she now belongs, the world where violence is buried in layers of hierarchy and consumerism, where the potential of using it belongs almost exclusively to powerful men.”
― Fien Veldman, Hard Copy