I knew the day was coming. I’d seen other mailboxes on my street hanging on for dear life after some asshole kid came by with a baseball bat. Mine has been a bit wobbly for a while now- not hanging at all, but certainly a bit looser than it should’ve been.
So today, when I went to check the mail and noticed it was missing, I figured it had just been knocked off the post. A bit of searching, though, through the weeds and poison ivy in the drop off on the side of the road, showed that not only did the asshole knock it off, he fucking well stole the damn thing.
I sure hope there wasn’t any mail I needed in it. Luckily, my Netflix fix is due tomorrow. I’m pretty sure that the mailbox was taken during the day, well before the mail got here- but I’ll never really know, now will I?
I’m renting here. As such, I imagine it’d be my landlord’s job to get me a new one. However, getting my landlord to do, well, anything is like pulling teeth. It just ain’t gonna happen, at least not within a reasonable timeframe.
So I’m off to WalMart to get a new one.
Bastards. You’re making me go to WalMart! I’ve killed men for less.
Once when I was in high school, a 16 year old kid in a BMW 3-series decided to play at being racecar driver on my street, and ended up plowing through two mailboxes, into my (parked) car, and narrowly avoided colliding with a giant oak tree in the yard. I (alone in the house at the time—high school let out at 1:30 or so where I lived) came out waving my arms and asking where the guy who hit him was, thinking that he got sideswiped into the driveway or something—nope, just a single inexperienced driver being a jackass.
His dad made him come out that weekend and replace the mailboxes for us, and pay to repair my car. I hear he lost his, too. Oh, and the police, of course, cited him for careless driving. That was not his finest moment, I would wager, although it’s arguably a more efficient way to take out mailboxes.
My mom’s brand new mailbox got smashed by some punk kids with a baseball bat. It was fixable, so I did. A week later, they got it again. I knocked the worst of the dents out and re-hung it. Cruising around the neighborhood, I see several more boxes that have been demolished, but oddly enough several others were unscathed.
By now, I’m on a mission to find these little assholes and have a good long talk with their daddies… when the box gets smashed again, right in front of my eyes.
It wasn’t kids with a bat at all. Was a big-ass oilwell-service truck being driven by some hayseed who can’t keep 'er 'tween the ditches on a 300-yard straight road.
All told, the company replaced about nine mailboxes on that road.
My brother and I installed a new mailbox at my mother’s house about 14 years ago. It’s a large heavy-gauge steel rural box on a 6x6 square PT post (with a top bar and angled support), sunk a good two feet in the ground with concrete surrounding.
Nobody has ever complained after running off the road and hitting it, but we have found pieces of their cars a couple times.
up in Northern Minnesota, a bunch of people have mailboxes on a swivel, so when snowplows or teenagers hit the mailbox, they just swing around and then rock back in to place. I’ve also seen simple 1/4 steel cradles made that hold the mailboxes on those swivels. Those prolly dent the snow plows, and leave the kid’s arms behind.
It probably depends on the location of the mailbox.
My parents live out in the country, with a rural mailbox. They’ve had mailboxes clobbered several times when the local teens play “mailbox baseball”, which requires a vehicle full of drunk teens with a baseball bat. This game is usually played after midnight, local time. At any rate, Daddy got really tired of replacing mailboxes, and for the latest one, he made a mold for a concrete base for the post. That base is about a foot and a half on each side, and about two and a half feet deep…plus it sticks up above the ground high enough to take out an oil pan or whatever else hangs low under a car. One of the risks of playing mailbox baseball is that the driver (who is at least as drunk as any of the players) often runs over the mailbox, which normally doesn’t cause a problem for him or his car. There are no curbs out where my parents live, only ditches by the sides of the road. But Daddy’s little booby trap WILL damage the car. Since the trap has been installed, my parents have observed several swerve marks over the years.
While this is somewhat of a safety hazard, I prefer to think of it as one of Darwin’s own traps. Anyone who is intentionally damaging other people’s property should be prepared for his own property to be damaged.
Back in the late 70’s when I was a teen and dinosaurs ruled the Earth, a rural neighbor of ours would regularly have their mailbox run down or bashed in. Finally they got sick of it and did the thick post set in concrete thing. The first snow of the season was only a couple of days later.
The next morning they came out to find a broken down car about 50 feet off the road, abandoned after hitting the post, having it not move, wrecking the car and throwing it off the road.
Easy enough for the county sheriff to follow the tracks in the snow about a mile and a half across the fields to the perpetrator’s house.
Well, I just replaced the damn thing. And lemme tell you, the next time the Mailbox-Bashing Twit tries to twittily bash my mailbox, he’s in for a surprise. I got the strongest metal box I could find- two layers of steel, that sucker’s heavy… and it’s mounted to a metal post. It’s driven 18 inches into the ground. There’s no cement involved, and a car could easily take the post out- but if Asshole tries to take a baseball bat to it, he’s gonna be stinging.
Did I mention that my neighbor’s box was gone yesterday, as well? Don’t get me wrong- I love living out in the sticks, but there are a few drawbacks.
Edited to add- the side of the road drops off pretty quickly, so it’s really unlikely a car could manage to hit the post and still avoid driving off into the gully.
The perp was probably grounded from using a parent’s car for life, and had to buy and use his own car. Usually these twits take a very different view about possibly wrecking a car that they paid for themselves.
Did the same thing, and we’re Northeast. Except that we used heavy-gauge plastic of some sort. Not Kevlar, but it kind of feels like it. Half-inch thick. Really good response. Hit it, it feels like whacking a soccer ball. Looks relatively normal, tears the bats right out of their hands. Found a few, some broken car windows…
Our neighbor in FL had a mailbox specially made - 1/4" steel plate formed in the proper mailbox shape, mounted on angle iron supports that were welded to a hefty hunk of steel tubing. You could see where someone tried to whack it - the paint was a little smudged. That neighbor was my hero!
Stupid ass down the street came screaming around the corner and took out our mailbox and severely bent the steel pipe it was mounted on. There were tire tracks in the mud at the end of our driveway and a hubcap in the ditch. I don’t know why we didn’t call the sheriff - we should have. Instead, we bought a new mailbox (we had been meaning to replace the old one for some time) cut off and straightened the post, and installed the new box. While we were out shopping, some “kind” soul came over, tried to set our mailbox back upright, and took the hubcap. We’ve had no problems since then.
After reading all this well earned malice towards mailbox vandals, I’m glad I’ve got a P.O. box. In this day of identity theft and rampant ignorance, it’s cheap peace of mind.
My traditional arm-jarring mailbox: buy two mailboxes, one small enough to fit inside the other with space surrounding it. Take the door off the smaller one. Now, set the smaller box inside the larger one, filling the gap with concrete. Presto, a concrete mailbox! Your postman can just open the door of the large outer box and leave mail in the doorless inner box. Before filling the box with concrete, you may want to run bolts out the bottom to connect to whatever sort of post you have planned; one ingenious one I’ve heard involved a huge industrial spring, which would cause the box to rebound when hit, causing delightful damage to the vandal’s car.
If your mailbox isn’t on the sidewalk, and you have a “getting run over” problem, the solution is easy: get a boulder, or several. For decorative purposes, of course. A nice tall 800-pound rock looks mighty fine next to a mailbox. Ain’t your fault some people can’t drive.
My parents live on a corner lot, and used to have problems with people driving on the lawn at the corner (again, no curbs where they live). Daddy put some “decorative” boulders along the line of the corner. One neighbor complained that the rocks were tearing up his car. Daddy said, mildly, that he felt that he had to cover up the bald spot on the corner, since some people kept running over that space so much that no grass could grow. He said that the boulders were far more attractive than the ruts that some people kept leaving in his yard.
Only in America… mailbox baseball… to funny, had a good laugh… concreting the damn things… just to funny.
However, we have these sort of problems here with hanging flower baskets in towns.
Or the “decorative” boulders near schools, when Mums come to collect their offspring and park on some poor fellas lawn. Another alternative to this problem was, accidently leaving a nailboard on the lawn… which is still the talk where it happend, since he punchered several tyres that day, as a result nobody ever parked on his front lawn ever again… every year after summerbreak, the teachers tell each new parent “not to park on Mr.O’Regan’s lawn”…