Hard Copy: A story of girl meets printer

“If some fateful day my present were to end and my future to vanish, then what I'd like most of all is for my life to be turned into a beautiful story. A story in which the materials and objects are described in all their dazzling glory. A story of gold, cashmere, dates, silk, airy chocolate mousse, fresh tobacco, gleaming oak wood and ripe mangos. A story where people have all the time in the world to land in unexpected situations, ending up in strangers' beds and tripping on acid. A story where the alarm never goes off, where credit cards are never declined.” Fien Veldman’s Hard Copy’s the story of a girl meets printer. “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. I am there for him and he is there for me. I have more feelings for my printer than for anyone else…I simply want to print and send out my letters, replace the cartridge every so often. I want to run my finger over the paper so I can tell if it's fit for use, as I always do. I want to go up to my own little office every day and I want to be left alone in there. I want to switch on my printer in the morning and listen to its start-up sounds as I take my first sip of coffee from my mug, the same one I use every day. I want to spend all day with the machine, watch the printed letters stack up.” “This machine knows everything about me. He knows my thoughts, my fantasies, my dreams. My love and my hate. And he is the only one who knows that story, the story for which there's barely any space, except in some dark storage room where no one ever goes. If anyone knows who I am, it is he. He was the listener, I the storyteller…it's a question of belief. The machine is just a device, almost just as ordinary as the printers in the copy shop. But for all that time, I thought he was different. I really thought he could hear me, that he understood me. But maybe I just imagined it all.” This philosophical printer is a literary genius!