When I come home from work in the evenings there is often something waiting for me on the doorstep. It is a red rubber band left there by the postman. When my elder son was little he would seize on these bands and add them to the giant rubber band ball he was making. But now I scoop them up along with the junk mail that has been pushed through the letter box and sling them into the bin.
Last week I got an email from a reader who takes a more assertive approach to stray bands. For years he has been collecting them in a pot but when the pot overflowed recently he emptied the lot into a large jiffy bag and sent it to Moya Greene, chief executive of Royal Mail. He pointed out that the little red bands carelessly discarded by her staff were an eyesore, a waste of rubber – and of money.
He got a nice letter back saying that she was aware of the problem and had passed the matter on to his local delivery office. In due course he got a second letter sent by the local manager who confirmed that for years Royal Mail had been trying to make staff aware of the “inconvenient [sic] that the rubber bands cause our customers”. It briefed “all staff regularly about the problem in our cuddles” (or did he mean “huddles”?) and discussed the issue during “Work Time Listening and Learning”. The letter ended by telling the reader to contact the manager directly if he had further “issues regarding elastic bands”, so that he could “tackle the person responsible right away”.