I was thinking yesterday about the tendency of organisations to get bigger, and of bosses to try to centralise control and introduce procedures to remove the need or opportunity for local staff to be independent.
I suppose if the Wormley branch had an employee who wanted to put a collecting tin for Palestinian Refugees on the counter, and someone in the Wensleydale branch wanted a tin for the Anglo Israeli friendship league, someone might just decide to ban all collecting tins, thus removing the need for arguments based on conflicting opinions of which charities were good and which were bad.
I heard yesterday that Italy had banned the wearing of religious symbols in schools. I was remembering that France did something similar when Moslem girls started wanting to wear simple headscarves. I am old enough to remember that French schools used to be littered with women wearing religious uniforms, but they used to be nuns and this was considered to be normal and praiseworthy. If you happened to be a non-Catholic you had to accept that your schooldays could get pretty nasty.
I'd bet 50p that the local manager was just trying to uphold rules that had been dumped on him by Head Office, because he knew that if he didn't do what he was told, his career would be short and inglorious.
