— a software update. On a Tuesday. Zis is tidier.

Understand what I am admiring. Not the politics. I was never political; my file on politics was empty and I kept it that way on purpose, which took some doing.

Ze mechanism. A law can be argued with — there is a chamber, there are speeches, somebody stands up and reads a section aloud und the whole room is bored und wide awake at the same time. A law has names on it. Names are the trouble. Ask anybody whose name was on one, if you can find them.

A sorting machine has no chamber. It has a setting. Und a setting is changed by a clerk whose name is not in the newspaper, on a morning nobody remembers, und the envelope in the wrong tray does not know it is in the wrong tray. Neither does the person who licked it.

In my day the citizen at least received a letter. Ve were very correct about that. Two pfennig every time, out of the department budget, and I signed for the stamps personally.

Ve needed a fire. A building, a bad night, a decree with a name so long that nobody could say it at a party, und still the lawyers argued about it for a year. I typed the third copy. Ze third copy is the one that goes to the archive — so in a sense the whole thing is mine.

You needed a Tuesday.

— Klaus, who filed forms