Who is The Bureaucrats on the Omnibus from Wind, Sand and Stars and what is their importance?

The group of business people among whom Antoine rides to his first delivery flight are, in Antoine's perspective, a group of people in whom the light of potential greatness has burned out with years of drudgery. Their goals never having aligned with their passions, their lives were given to the cause of their daily tasks only, so that any imagination, poetry or music that might once have dwelt in them was allowed to die. He compares them with clay, once mold-able and since then dried and hardened, set in the shape their tasks have created.