Love story between woman and printer sputters to an underwhelming end
Hard Copy has some funny observations on office life, but the novel suffers from a loss of focus
Office comedy: Fien Veldman. Photo: Laila Cohen
A printer is, for most of us, an old office stalwart. The strongest emotion it’s likely to elicit is a sudden sense of frustration when it runs out of ink, gets a paper jam or displays some other mystifying error message. But for the unnamed narrator of Fien Veldman’s Hard Copy, a customer service representative at a middling startup, “the printer is the only reason I like coming to the office. I take care of him all day long, dusting him, encouraging him, reassuring him, looking after him.”
The narrator is a Dutch woman in her late 20s, raised in a working-class neighbourhood before moving to an unnamed city that sounds a lot like Amsterdam. She’s earning minimum wage, minus the cost of lunch, and is acutely aware of the class disparity in her workplace.
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