People of the Copier

KASN (People of the Copier) types feel the urge to "do something" more strongly than anyone in a crisis. And crucially, the body moves before the content of that "something" has been examined. On the morning after the lockdown, a sheet of A4 paper lay beside every single person in the store. Titled "Escape Plan," it was the thing you'd been copying all night. The pages were blank.

To be clear, the blankness was not laziness. It was a participatory design philosophy: "the plan is something we'll all fill in together." The philosophy was admirable. It's just that no one filled anything in.

Raises morale

KASN's real weapon is not the deliverable but the sheer motion. The sight of you racing around the store, handing out paper, drawing arrows on the whiteboard (a cardboard box, since there isn't one) gives the group the feeling that "something is moving forward," regardless of content. In reality nothing is moving. But despair is born from the sense that "nothing is moving," and you keep precisely destroying that one sensation. In a way, it's cutting-edge mental health care.

With the toner

On day 15, the copier runs out of toner. It was also the day your fuel ran out. Deprived of paper to hand out, you go quiet with alarming speed. For the first time, the group realizes: that meaningless daily paper drop was their morning alarm clock, their sense of the date, their normalcy. At your funeral procession, everyone lined up holding a blank plan. To the very end, no one wrote anything on it.