OK, I'm going to prattle on here, pretty much irrelevantly, like an old man.
In the 1980s, I was a despatch rider in London. I used to have a pretty irrational hatred of stuff attached to my bike (still do, in fact), but as we really needed them, I had a topbox bungy-strapped to the back of my saddle. It didn't increase the footprint of the bike in any way, but I still didn't like it much.
So, the company I worked for employed a new manager. He was enthusiastic, and went about getting everything shipshape with some gusto. One of his directives (along with reasonable stuff like insisting we all wear company bibs etc at all times) was that all bikes had to have a fixed rack and topbox.
Of course, my reaction was 'sod off'. I wasn't alone. Nobody who didn't already have one wanted to do it, not least of all because it meant spending 50 quid on a rack. The stakes were upped when he told us we had a week to get them done, or he would dock our pay.
So, next week, having had this latest directive ignored, we all had £10 snaffled from our wages on the Friday. A note informed us that the same would happen the next week too. We adjourned to the pub . . . an agreement was made.
On Monday morning, of the usual 40 or so riders who worked there (we were actually all self-employed), only 15 people turned up to work.
An hour later, all the £10 'fines' had been repaid out from the cash box, and the subject was never raised again. To be fair, he was still working there when I left some time later, so there's no 'he got fired for it' ending, but it was kind of satisfying.
OK, carry on chaps. This was all fields when I was a boy, you know . . .
