In the Office

It is an attractive offer: in the spirit of integration and social equality, a new employee with a background of poverty is to be hired in a modern company. The team agrees that this is a good thing, and they are always open to new impulses. But when the new colleague actually arrives, they become uncertain: how do you talk to someone who grew up in poverty? Can you still talk about your own little everyday luxuries? Do you perhaps need a code of conduct? After all, you don't want to put your foot in it or unintentionally offend anyone. Even though the office specializes in advanced solutions for all kinds of problems, dealing with the newcomer is increasingly becoming a challenge. And then she starts asking uncomfortable questions that make the close-knit office community more and more suspicious – is she really here to work or is she up to something completely different?

Elisabeth Pape's sharp-witted, offbeat and witty description of the social and interpersonal abysses of the modern working world is a microcosm of coexistence in which money is omnipresent – and with it come questions of wealth, advancement, equal opportunities, the question of how we want to work and who can afford to leave work early.