Where Have All The Rubber Bands Gone?
Posted on | March 15, 2004 at 7:59 am | 9 Comments
I don’t have any rubber bands in my house. Actually, I don’t have any spare rubber bands. My sister didn’t believe me when she was here several weeks ago, but it’s true. The few I have are holding closed the bags of frozen vegetables in my freezer. I blame the newspaper industry.
Once upon a time, you could get more rubber bands than you could possibly use – pretty much one a day, in fact. But for the past couple of years, my local newspaper has come enclosed in a plastic bag every day, even though we don’t get a lot of precipitation in this part of the country. Oh sure,I was always the first to complain when I got a wet paper – but really, how hard is it to determine if a bag is going to be needed that morning or not? Because of this wanky policy, plastic bags are filling up the landfills and I have no rubber bands in my house.
If this is happening all over the country, then I expect it’s having an adverse effect on the rubber band industry. Do people (besides office supply managers) buy boxes of rubber bands at the store? Are the rubber band companies trying to rebrand themselves and branch off into different markets? I’m sure glad I don’t have stock in any of those companies (as far as I know).
Funniest quote I’ve read so far this week – from the letters page of an Entertainment Weekly a few weeks back (I’m behind in my EW reading): “Correction: A TV movie called The Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on Gilligan’s Island was planned but never produced. The project became The Harlem Globetrotters on Gilligan’s Island.” I’m not sure why, but that really cracked me up. I did think I was going insane when they originally mentioned it, because I sure didn’t remember a TV movie with the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders on Gilligan’s Island. That seems like the sort of thing one would remember. I do vaguely remember that Harlem Globetrotters one though.
Latre.
Comments
9 Responses to “Where Have All The Rubber Bands Gone?”
March 15th, 2004 @ 10:53 am
:O
all the rubber bands are at MY house!
they are trapped in a drawer with all the twist ties that have amassed there…..
i remember the H. Globetrotters one too….shudder!!! :crazy:
March 15th, 2004 @ 10:03 pm
I say it’s shoddy rubber-band manufacturing: when I was a kid, rubber bands would never dry out and break, but nowadays, let the damned things sit in a drawer for a few months and *-splut!-* they’re gone.
I think "yellow stickies" (to avoid the brand name) have taken over, as well as those binder clips that are so useful. (Man, whoever invented those things must be rolling in Maseratis…) Plus, there’s the ongoing breeding of paper clips…
(No, I am not an office-supply fetishist.)
March 15th, 2004 @ 10:22 pm
Funny you shoud mention binder clips and fetishists, Jeff. We used to call them "bondage clips". We would even dress them up like Star Wars characters and have Bondage Wars.
March 17th, 2004 @ 7:41 pm
It takes a rare and profound meditation to rouse me from observation into participation. You have GOT to talk to your paper carrier about this situation. I’m here to tell you it’s still possible to receive a newspaper secured with a rubber band. We subscribe to about 20 of them (newspapers) at the library, and easily half are rubber-banded. A few arrive in evil plastic bags (sometimes with a separate compartment to hold a special, expensive advertising circular) and a few simply arrive flat. But then, ours don’t get tossed from a bicycle – or (more likely anymore) the driver’s side of a car. Since it’s highly immoral to throw away a rubber band, we have gazillions. We’ve taken to wrapping one around each patron’s reserves, even if a patron only has one book on the reserve shelf. No need to keep anything *together* if there’s only one, but it helps control the rubber band population.
I don’t get the paper at home, so I own about three rubber bands. Interestingly, all of them are around partial bags of frozen produce.
March 22nd, 2004 @ 3:04 pm
We don’t receive a daily paper at home, but rubber bands seem to accumulate on our front porch — methinks the mail carrier be the culprit. These and the heavy-duty elastics that secure bunches of broccoli are about the only rubber-band resource chez nous, and like she who rarely comments, I mostly use ‘em to secure opened bags of frozen corn and peas.
At work — where securing thick bundles of manuscripts and page proofs is da norm — I almost exclusively use binder clips because elastics are as scarce as hens’ molars. The documentation from the last major project I worked on is currently held together by a stretchy bow that adorned a box of Christmas candy in a past life. I should probably start bringing bunches o’ broccoli to the office.
March 24th, 2004 @ 10:10 am
I’m just commenting on Amy’s clever alias – esp. after that comment I made the other day about everyone wanting to be an MC…
What? There are other people reading this?
March 24th, 2004 @ 11:15 am
thanks, kid! just don’t tell d. that i used the "aimless" sobriquet — he hates that.
also of huge, major importance: i forgot to mention that it’s probably a good thing that we don’t have lots of rubber bands at home, since our cat’s mission in life is to eat them, which could prove at worst fatal and at best expensive. (feline abdominal surgery cost a friend eight bills when his cat ate a hair ribbon back in the early ’90s.)
March 24th, 2004 @ 11:41 pm
Sorry, Rog – we’re taking over your space to talk about cats again. Yeah, our ex-kitty Spin (who died a year and half ago) decided at one point to eat some very fine thread. It, of course, was kitty-tongue-colored thread, so nearly impossible to see – and it required the F-to-the-A-to-the-S and the Hummer-sized wad of Benjamins for the vet – and of course, he did this on a weekend immediately before a party we were hosting. Exquisite timing, little guy. We miss him still.
March 25th, 2004 @ 10:30 am
Don’t worry – I have nothing against cats or cat talk, just against Cat People.
:O