Office Ninja

Lars Berge

OFFICE NINJA is a dry and darkly humorous satire on working life – The Office meets Being John Malkovich. Come along for the ride!

On one of the myriad identical floors of a large office complex about 20 minutes outside Stockholm resides Helm Tech, a company in the “safety market” providing bicycle helmets to the Swedish consumer. Jens Jansen, a brand manager at Helm Tech, has up until now led a very ordinary middle-class life. As a middle manager, Jens does his utmost to avoid actual work. His mundane life depresses him, but he feels unable to change it. His marriage is in ruins, but he couldn’t care less.

When Jens suspects he will be promoted – which would mean having to do actual work – he plans his own disappearance. But does he travel the world? No, he hides in the office, in the server room that no one uses. He crawls through the ventilation system to go to the bathroom, drinks from the water cooler, eats his colleagues’ lunches. He is so ordinary that it takes weeks before anyone at the office realises Jens is in fact no longer there.

“…above all, Office Ninja is a fine example of the eternal mystery of workplace humour: that something so fundamentally dull can be made so entertaining.’

-Helsingborgs Dagblad

“Lars Berge’s ‘The Office’-inspired debut is a quirky contemporary farce that ends in a knock-out punch, an intelligent satire on the management culture that has elevated empty rhetoric into law.”

– M-Magazine

“With Office Ninja, Lars Berge has succeeded in hitting a raw nerve in social development. Not even Ricky Gervais in the TV series ‘The Office’ managed to make modern working life seem so frightfully empty.”

– Arbetarbladet