We’ve got a box of rubber bands that’s been part of our office since before the last time we moved. It’s an ordinary, rather tattered actually, cardboard box with a little rip-out lid so that you can grab a single rubber band out of the morass inside. It’s a sort of zen calming device. You have to relax and work gently to remove a rubber band from the box. If you’re in too much of a hurry and try to just grab one rubber band and yank it out it’ll get tangled up with its neighbors and you’ll wind up with a huge clot of rubber bands springing out and showering all over the office floor.
Still, it’s better than those plastic bags of bands from the office supply shops. Something about the plastic interacts with the rubber and both the bag and the bands wind up kind of greasy and tacky to the touch. When the box was first emptied we tried getting a bag of bands, which is when we discovered the problem. We wound up fishing the empty box out of the trash and refilling it from the bag.
Obviously, we’ll be bringing it with us to the new office. It’s not just that it’s been an office fixture for at least five years, I just don’t think it’s physically possible for us to get rid of the box. I mean, not only is it so inextricably visually linked with ‘rubber band’ in our collective minds that without the box, none of us would know where the bands are, but also we’ve refilled it so often that it’s taken on a life of its own. If we tried to get rid of it now it’d just follow us, like some kind of strange cursed monkey paw like object…
A monkey paw full of rubber bands.
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