"Many thinkers worry about the progressive bureaucratization of the world and the social threat of its terror. Yet they forget that these very bureaucrats are themselves terrorized, and that they are terrorized by their desks. Once plunked down behind one, a man will never learn to tear himself free. The loss of his desk will strike him as a natural disaster, a catastrophe, a fall into the abyss. Notice how many people commit suicide at their desks and how many are carried straight from their desks to psychiatric hospitals, how many suffer their heart attacks behind desks. Whoever sits down behind a desk begins to think differently: his vision of the world and his hierarchy of values change. From then on he will divide humanity into those who have desks and those who do not, and into significant owners of desks and insignificant ones. He will now see his life as a frenzied progress from one small desk to a wider desk. Once ensconced behind a desk he masters a distinct language and knows things – even if yesterday, deskless, he knew nothing. I have lost many friends for reasons of desks. Once they were truly close friends. I cannot say what demon it is that slumbers in a man and makes him talk differently once he’s set behind a desk. Our symmetrical, brotherly relations fall into higher and lower, a pecking order that makes us both feel uncomfortable and there is no way to reverse the process. I can tell that the desk already has him in it’s clutches, in a full nelson. After a few experiments I give up and quit calling. Both of us, I think, accept the outcome with relief. From then on I have know that whenever one of my friends starts achieving ever more showy desks, he is lost to me. I avoid him to spare myself the lurch that marks every transition from symmetry to asymmetry in human relationships. Sometimes a man will get up from behind his desk to walk down and talk with you at the other end of his office, in a couple of armchairs or at a round table. Such a person knows what desks are and knows that a chat between people divided by one is like a discussion between a sergeant perched in the turret of a thank and a raw frightened recruit standing at attention and looking right into the barrel of a big gun."

Ryszard Kapuscinski (repórter polaco), The Soccer War, págs 146, 147 [escrito nos anos 70, em pleno pesadelo do comunismo no Leste Europeu, continua cheio de pertinência]