I mean, please. You walk to work, because I have no sidewalks and the ONLY pedestrian traffic on my very narrow and busily travelled road is foot traffic for day workers walking to and from town for work, and a few women who are not permitted to drive. ( I live near an ultra-orthodox Jewish village and the women are not permitted to have driver’s licenses. :rolleyes: So, they walk to the stores and back. )
I suspect it is not the women. I think some asshole is stealing my paper and I’m getting tired of it. Look, buy your own fucking paper, ok?? One of life’s great pleasures is walking down my three hundred foot driveway early in the morning, getting the paper, sitting down and reading it. You’re robbing me of my morning pleasures you dick.
I want to put a small card duct taped under the plastic mailbox type of newspaper holder we have out on the road that says, " Buy your own fucking paper ! " but that will result no doubt in the demolition of said plastic mailbox.
I can call the paper company and they will actually deliver another one later on in the day but I have two problems with this solution.
It is not a lack of accuracy on the part of the paper delivery person. I don’t think they are forgetting us suddenly. Lots of folks on our block get the paper.
It costs the company MONEY to do this.
I have no time at noon to stop work and read. It’s a morning pleasure.
On the one hand, I’m delighted that someone loves to read the paper. OTOH, buy your own fucking paper you sleazeball thief !!!
How do you know it’s being stolen (as opposed to never delivered in the first place)? My newspaper delivery stopped because I had it paid automatically to my credit card each month and the card expired. They stopped delivery. I updated my credit card. The paper is back.
Why would you not think it was a woman, you sexist pig!
My neighbor up the street personally witnessed the **senior citizen, ** Bob, across the street stealing his next door neighbor’s paper. What we don’t know is if Bob stole it with the intention of reading it and then returning it to the neighbor’s driveway. Irregardless, who would have suspected the 70 year old man of such thievery?
I think he means the mores of the women’s religious community forbids them to apply for a license, not that there is any legal stricture prohibiting it.
Well, nowadays surveillance cameras are rather cheap. Or you could try getting up even earlier, hiding in the bushes with a baseball bat and catch the thief in the act!
I don’t understand why you’re assuming it’s a pedestrian. Why not a driver who for obscure reasons has decided that your mailbox is the one he’ll steal his daily newspaper from? Your delivery guy drops it off from his car, yes? So why not steal it from a car, too? Just pull up to it, pause, grab the paper, and go.
We once thought someone was stealing our newspaper. It turned out the delivery guy was delivering it to the wrong house. Neighbors on either side contined to get their papers normally, but not us. It was a new guy, and he hadn’t learned the sequence of street numbers properly yet. I don’t think it’s safe to assume that “because our neighbors receive theirs, this must mean that someone is stealing ours.”
I’d check with the front office and make sure it’s not just being delivered wrong before I invested in either dog turds or surveillance equipment.
Also, I’d think it would be more effective to keep insisting that the company keep delivering a second paper, than to utilize either dog turds or surveillance, because dog turds will only escalate things IMO (the kind of person who would steal your paper can think of ugly things to do with a recycled dog turd he just found; “smearing it on your front door” is only the first thing that pops into my head, I’m sure he could be much more creative).
And whatcha gonna do with your surveillance video, once actually manage to get the culprit on film stealing your paper? It’s not exactly going to be a high priority for local law enforcement. And confronting him with the resultant video–assuming that you recognize him, that it’s not some total stranger that you have no idea how to contact-- is more likely to elicit a “So what? It’s only a fuckin’ newspaper, dude…”, and may not stop the behavior.
As long as the company is willing to keep bringing you another paper, I’d keep on with that. And they may get fed up with it and investigate themselves, who knows. I know that doesn’t solve your problem of wanting to read it at breakfast, but is it perhaps available online in the morning? Mine is.
This is why I love the Dope. Dog turds AND Calvin and Hobbs. Brilliant.
PunditLisa, I checked- they checked. It is being delivered, so it’s not the driver.
What’s wrong with being sexy, anyway??
What Skald the Rhymer said. It is an Ultra-Orthodox Jewish community. You are right- state law in all 50 + P.R. allows both penis-weilders and those endowed with po-po’s to operate motor vehicles. It is frowned upon by this religious sect and I suspect I will live here a mighty long time before I witness a woman driving a car who is a member of this sect. DuckDuckGoose, I’ll be delighted to tell you why I know it is not a driver. I do not live in the United Kingdom, I live in the United States. Aside from a few very specialized vehicles, automobiles here are operated from the left side of the vehicle by the operator. The driver would have to:
A) Stop, scoot over to the right-hand window, roll down the window, reach down to the newspaper holder, steal it and scoot back, or
B) Be driving a right-side drive, or
C) Approach my driveway, stop their vehicle, get out, walk into oncoming traffic, move around the front of their car, take the newspaper and retrace their steps.
There is no sidewalk. There are high hedges just past the newspaper box and mailbox. It is one lane in each direction with just a double yellow line separating. The speed limit is 40, most are doing 45-55 when they plow past my driveway.
Because I know all of these to be true, I know it is not a driver. As PunditLisa so astutely pointed out, I cannot prove if it is a pedestrian or a pedestrienne. More on that later ( I plan to get palm scrapings as the thefts occur so I can run DNA. Then, by god, I’ll know the gender of the rascal.
Wile E, what do i do if the perpetrator is not a baseball fan?
I’d probably find an opportunity to be there when the paper is delivered some day and wait patiently to see who comes by to take it. Not necessarily because I want an angry, potentially violent confrontation with a newspaper-thief, but out of curiosity (it’s always interesting to see who is stealing newspapers.) After catching the thief I’d have stern words for them, if it was a neighbor, hopefully the shame would keep them from repeating the theft afterwards.
I have an interesting story in which me and a friend were in a similar situation. My friend’s dad was the vice principal at the local High School. As VP, he was generally responsible for “disciplining” the children who would get kicked out of class, caught skipping, caught with alcohol/cigarettes and et cetera. So he wasn’t all that popular with area teenagers and his house was regularly the target of drive-by eggings, mail box defacements and etc.
He also happened to live in the last house on a dead end street, with several lots of undeveloped property in between him and the other houses on the street. So in general, he didn’t get much “through traffic” except for the rare occasions when someone was lost.
Well, me and my friend were sitting on his porch when we saw a car driving very slowly down the road, past the house. My friend was immediately suspicious and suggested we both go hide by the hedges to see if the car was going to try to do some mischief when it circled back around (the house was on the left side of the road if you were coming down the street), sure enough the car comes to a creeping stop and the window comes down right near the mailbox and paper box. My friend, immediately springs into action and yells, “What the HELL ARE YOU DOING?” He was quite embarrassed when he realized it was the 15 year old who delivers the paper being driven along his route by his dad. After an embarrassed explanation and some laughs they were on their way, and I believe when it came collection time for the paper the guy’s dad gave him a bigger than usual tip.
Perhaps because the culprit would see Cartooniverse skulking and not steal the paper?
This kind of thing happened to us once - on Saturdays one of the three papers we got went missing. The paper gets delivered around 4 am. Since we don’t have a long driveway, I set my alarm some mornings to try to see what was happening, but I didn’t feel like staying up a couple of hours to maybe catch the perp. I solved it by setting my alarm, getting up just after the paper was delivered, taking it in, and going back to bed. Whoever did it probably decided to steal someone else’s.
That’s where we have the advantage on you here in the UK . All newspapers and mail is delivered through the front door. So no opportunity for it to be stolen.
My dad had an elderly neighbor that kept stealing his paper so one morning he went out really early and took a shit in the paper and folded it back up and the guy never took his paper again. I like to imagine the neighbor folding out the paper on the table next to his breakfast and finding a nice surprise.
Cartooniverse mentioned he had hedges, I was assuming he’d be able to watch unseen (possibly even from his house if he can see the paper box from a window.)
I’ve never seen any houses which don’t have mail slots. Some apartment blocks have the mail boxes in the lobby , but apart from that I can’t think of any examples.
As a former UK paper boy, I can tell you that sometimes huge Sunday paper + teeny little mail slot = ripped to shreds paper & frustrated paper boy.
Of course, Cartooniverse’s comment about right-hand-drive vehicles is nonsensical in context, since we drive on the left here, so the potential culprit’s vehicle would have to be left-hand-drive to pull the prank.
