Alex Krzyminski

“Consider this man, Jorgmund’s most expendable son. He wears his second-best suit (or third-best, or tenth-, who knows, but he’s surely not risking his Royce Allen bespoke in a tank, not for any kind of promotion) and his face is smooth with Botox and lotion. Without genetic engineering, without intervention or expense, the Jorgmund Company has remade him, barracked him in some halfway ville dortoir and stripped him of his connection with the world in a crash course of management schools and loyalty card deals, surrounded him with pseudo-spaces, malls and water features, so that he is allergic to pollen and pollution and dust and animal fibre and salt, gluten, bee stings, red wine, spermicidal lubricant, peanuts, sunshine, unpurified water and chocolate, and really to everything except the vaccum-packed, air-conditioned in-between where he spends his life. Dick Washburn, known for evermore as Dickwash, is a type D pencilneck: a sassy wannabe paymaster with vestigial humanity. This makes him vastly less evil than a type B pencilneck (heartless bureaucratic machine, pro-class tennis) and somewhat less evil than a type C pencilneck (chortling lackey of the dehumanising system, ambient golf), but unquestionably more evil than pencilneck types M through E (real human screaming to escape a soul-devouring professional persona, varying degrees of desperation). No one I know has ever met the type A pencilneck, in much the same way that no one ever reports their own fatal accident; a type A pencilneck would be a person so entirely consumed by the mechanism in which he or she is employed that they had ceased to exist as a separate entity. They would be odourless, faceless and undetectable, without ambition or restraint, and would take decisions entirely unfettered by human concerns, make choices for the company, of the company. A type A pencilneck would be the kind of person to sign off on torture and push the nuclear button for no more pressing reason than that it was his job—or hers—and it seemed the next logical step.”
― Nick Harkaway, The Gone-Away World