One-year-old boy gets life ban from post office for having dog mess on his shoe

Collette Ross, 21, and her son Jay, who will be two in January, only realised there was a problem after they had already entered the Crewe Road North establishment.

Collette, who apologised for the incident at the time, said she was shocked when the following day one of the men who runs the post office told her she and Jay were no longer welcome in the shop, which her family have used for years.

She said: “Jay hasn’t been walking for long and I have him on reins when we’re out in the street. He’s got a lot of energy and was running about the shop while I was in the queue, as kids that age will do. At one point he did run behind the counter, which Sur, the man who barred me, wasn’t happy about, but he is just a child.

“When I realised what he had on his shoes, I of course immediately apologised.

“My father went to the post office later that afternoon and Sur went mad at him too. Then when I went in the next day he told me: ‘Everytime I look at you, you make me angry. I don’t want you back in here.’

“I couldn’t believe it. My family has been going to that post office for years, he has known me since I was a bairn. I can’t believe he would stoop so low.

“I can understand him being upset about what happened, but all he had to say was ‘In future could you make sure before coming in’ which I would have been doing anyway – I was embarrassed myself that I didn’t see it!

Collette’s father, William Ross, 57, aded: “When I went in a couple of hours after the incident, he started ranting at me,  saying ‘Your daughter has caused all this upset! I had to shut the shop!’

“He was clearly trying to embarrass me and was acting in a very over-the-top fashion. His voice was very loud – the whole shop could hear him and he kept asking other people in the post office what they thought of what had happened, pointing at me and saying ‘that’s her dad’. Some customers did sympathise with him, but a few others told him to just count to ten.

“I was determined to keep calm, so I just reminded him that it was an accident and that she had apologised.”

He then started asking how I would feel if he walked into my house with something on his shoe. I said if he’d done it on purpose I would be annoyed, but that if it had been an  accident and he’d said sorry, I would have just cleaned it up – what else would I do?

“I told him that if Collette had known before they had gone into the post office I would have been angry with her too, but that she hadn’t and it was just one of those things.”

The 57-year-old continued: “I couldn’t believe it when she told me the next day that she’d been barred–- a mother and her wee boy! There’s never been any problems before, we would always chat away with them.

“Now she’ll have to get a bus to use the post office on Boswell Parkway, as will the rest of the family. We will not be going back in there unless we get an apology.”

When the Evening News contacted the Crewe Road North post office and asked for Sur, the man said he did not wish to comment.