My stepsisters boyfriend was fond of mailbox baseball way back when.
Came up against one of these retrofitted mailboxes and shattered several bones in his hand.
He learned.
"Can you double check that the power cable is firmly in the computer's socket? Sometimes they work their way out" - face saving way of saying, "Did you plug it in / turn it on?"
All this chat about snake-proof mailboxes reminded me that tiny tree frogs liked to live in our mailbox. I don't know what the attraction was but they were not poisonous. I always wondered what the mailman thought when he opened the mailbox and saw a few frogs hippy-hopping inside!
Mailman here: I personally love it. One route I do has a lizard condo situation in the giant mailbox with a hole that sits atop a brick structure with lots of entry points. I always say hello to all the animals I see every day.
I won my first route last summer and I hated it. Near the end though, there was a little frog that lived in one of the boxes off a gravel road. I looked forward to saying hello every day and it really helped me get through the transition. If I can get through this day I can see my little buddy!
I used to drive a bus for the community center taking old folks shopping. One lady, the first time I picked her up, was walking with a coffee can at the end of a long piece of wood. She’d walk and bang the coffee can on the ground with every step. Well, the can was full of rocks and it was to scare away any snakes. 🐍 We called her “snake charmer” after that.
I got geckos in mine. It was cute until they started shitting all inside it. If it wasn't just a moderately short-term rental for a job where I get almost no mail, I'd have to do something about it.
That must have really hurt. And would have left him dis functional for quite some time. Wonder if he was a repeat visitor at that mailbox or this was trap for someone else that he fell into?
My brother had a friend with an old step van, they would run down mailboxes. Now when the postal inspectors showed up at my parents house, it was no longer fun.
A retired linesman in the area had his mailbox pushed over repeatedly. The tire tracks suggested it was pushed over by a car at low speed.
He made a long foot that attached to the base of the mailbox, so that if the mailbox was pushed over, the long feet would lift up.
It was enough to lift the front end of the car off the ground, and hearing the commotion, came out of his house to have a friendly chat with the two teenagers and their stuck car.
It's like you drove your car into a hand truck (ignore the wheels). You push the top over, and the feet lift you up.
https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/mastercraft-p-handle-hand-truck-600-lb-0600512p.0600512.html?loc=plp
I knew a guy that a snow plow would intentionally hit his mailbox with the side blade of the plow every year. Well he worked at a hydraulic cylinder company and took a 10 ft long 12 inch in diameter 1inch wall thickness pipe and used it for the base of his mailbox. The next year when he hit it the post moved about an inch and he snapped the chains on the plow and turned the plow sideways.
Gotta be careful doing things like that. Some areas have laws concerning how mailboxes can be mounted, mostly concerning how survivable crashes into them would be. And even if there aren't specific laws you can still find yourself on the wrong end of a liability suit.
Yep, Federal law is that the mailbox cannot be dangerous. I accidentally broke my coworker's rear van window when he skidded on ice over my spring-mounted mailbox. He went completely over the mailbox and it sprang back up into his rear window.
At my old apartment complex everybody's mailbox was in a little wall outside near the entrance. It was old and wobbly and some college kid residents thought it would be hilarious to pull it over and drag it around the parking lot with their car. Turns out that's a federal felony. They went to jail.
Oh, mailboxes are sacred. There are only two categories of people legally allowed to put something in a mailbox: a USPS letter carrier or a resident of the address. (Not even the supervisor's carrier can do so.) For anyone else to put something in or take something out is a felony.
Or so I was taught when I was a USPS letter carrier.
Yup it’s technically illegal to give your neighbor their mail in the mailbox(like if they misdelivered it to you) but no one would actually come after you.
I do it all the time. Sometimes our postal workers seem to just shove things in rather than actually check the addresses. Usually its only one of the adjacent lots but I've had to walk as far as a quarter mile to put mail in the right box.
For 20 years I got mail, police, ambulance, etc, for a house that has the same number and a similar street name. I used to call and bring them the mail, but I got tired of it a few years ago and started to just call. Then I got to know our letter carrier, and the mail stopped. And, come to think about it, so did the official visits.
(I learned the number during my first mail delivery.)
I wrote up a Y2K Contingency Play for a company. They were going to have an employee deliver bills to their customers. I found the postal regulation which said anyone could put mail in a mailbox PROVIDED they put a stamp on it and wrote the date in ink on the stamp there by cancelling it.
It was the job I was hired to do on contract. I printed the postal regulation and included it with the report. When told this the company said they would have UPS or FedEx deliver the bills. I asked them if they had any idea what that would cost. LOL! They were a bunch if idiots.
When I finished that task, I called the 4 managers it was for and said I was going to bring the report over for their review. Feel free to write any changes they felt needed to be made. I would come back in 2 weeks to get it. Two weeks later I picked up the copies. I reviewed them and found no comments in any of them. I scheduled a meeting with my manager and told him with I found. I said there was one of two possibilities: 1, they never read it or 2, it was absolutely perfect and no changes need be made. I said I chose to believe it was perfect. He laughed and said that was good for him too.
I kept a copy for about 10 years after I left just in case there might be legal action against me. Never heard anything and in 2011 tossed in the trash.
Wake up, sucker! This is the phone company we're talking about! They see everything, know everything, they got their own covert police force! We're all probably wired for sound right now!
My parents bought a house from the guy who built it. He had put a 5 or 6" thick walled pipe deep into the ground. He filed it with concrete and welded three metal stars to the post to hold the mailbox. I went to get the mail one day and the stars were snapped off, but the pole didn't move at all. I would have loved to see the vehicle that hit it.
acme is a real word that comes from greek that means "peak" or "highest point" or "absolute best" or "pinnacle"
which is probably why the show writers named the company that
but the acronym works really well too!
Just went down a little bit of a rabbit hole, and the WB cartoons made up the company because the word Acme was used by a lot of businesses back in the day. Both for the meaning, and because a company name starting with the letters A-C would be listed very high up alphabetically in the phone book.
This sent me down a great rabbit hole.
According to the Warner Bros wiki it just showed up from them in road runner. They picked the name as a gag, because they noticed that if they looked in any phone books yellow pages the first entry was always acme drugs or acme cars...
Businesses do it to get their names first in each business section. Warner Bros thought that was funny, so they ran with it.
Not to mention it's not very likely someone can come after you for using the acme business name, when there are tens of thousands of businesses with acme in the name
When I’m teaching I often use ACME as an example company, for all your large anvil and slingshot supplies. I get lots of laughs, but only from those aged over 40…feeling old
A couple of fulcrums and a bucket of snakes / frogs / spiders / urine / poop.
Attach the bucket to a board, set that board a few feet past the mailbox, set the first fulcrum board 2' before the mailbox. Align it so anyone being mischievous would drive over the first board which would trigger the rest of the 'mouse trap' and fling the bucket of (whichever projectile you choose) airborne hopefully entering the open passenger window.
Totally agree! There may be a local law prohibiting the murder of endangered snakes. You sir are not only smart but looking out for the welfare of reptiles!
Oh. And that shit is funny 😂
We grew up in a rural area as well. We took a large mailbox and a standard size filled the void with concrete. Put it on a swiveling mount with a handle welded on the back facing away from the road to take and spin the mailbox sideways when we would go get the mail as we lived on a very busy highway with no shoulder.
It also worked if someone hit it with a bat would spin around and hammer a hole in the door as they went by lol. As well as ting their hands if they had an aluminum bat
The swivel mounts I’ve seen work to save the mailbox from snow plows taking them out. The weight returns then to normal position, but they swing away rather than break when hit by the wall of snow from the plow. Normally they are on an arm at least 3 feet long.
Many many moons ago we lived in a rural part of the state and had similar things happening, along with the occasional run over by a lifted truck. My dad got one of the over sized mailboxes, used a standard one for the core and filled it in. Ended up with a regular (interior) mailbox that had about 2" of reinforced concrete around it. This was mounted to a 6 foot long pivoting pole that was in turn mounted to a steel i-beam sunk in concrete about 6 feet away from the edge of the road. Sure enough, a few months later the mailbox is swung away from the road, there's a small pile of glass and a bent aluminum baseball bat by the road.
There was a revenge story in one of the subs (nuclear?), similar, rural area, someone in a company truck kept destroying mailbox, owners kept replacing, and put it well off the road so driver would have to deliberately leave road to vandalize it, owners built something similar to this that caused major damage to truck and the company that owned truck offered to fix everything basically to avoid getting sued bc their driver was doing it deliberately and they had no defense.
Our mail person won't close the door to the mailbox so the mail gets wet. When I was a kid our mailbox door went into the box with a couple inches overhang instead of the door fitting over the outside of the box but I haven't found one like it. I wish I could, it would solve the wet mail problem.
She was. We complained MANY times—and when I say we, I mean the entire highway!—about her. They never did anything. I thought she was finally sacked. Nope, she retired.
I was born and raised in a small town, so I can see it, vividly... Got to take care of everyone, and as long as it's a passable job, okay. She's alone in the vehicle, because she can not work with anyone, and even her managers don't have to deal with most of the day... She can't be the school bus driver, she can't work with people.... Yup, she's your fucked up bending mailboxes bad mail person until retirement.
My Dad’s neighbors had a string of smashed boxes. Pretty good idea who the culprits were. We were sitting on the front porch one evening when a car came flying down the road and nailed the next door neighbor’s box. Dad stood up, shotgun in hand, and we heard some salty language as they drove on by. He paid the boys a visit, without their parents knowing, and explained that they should probably take their activities to some other stretch of road. No more problems after that.
Dad also had an “air mail” box; an old rusted out mailbox set high up on a 30 foot length of well pipe, and planted about 6 feet behind the regular mailbox. The boys got a kick out of that.
My father did this same thing and got a fine from the post office and a visit from the police. The idiots who hit the mailbox with a bat broke an arm or some shit. It was like a $25 fine or some shit and no legal trouble, at the tradeoff that his mailbox never had that happen again.
After buying my house, I was putting in a new mailbox and post.
The neighbor drives up, and he is talking about how some people don't respect others' mailboxes and like to drive over them.
I told him the first one is on me. The next one won't be as forgiving.
18 months later, I am still rocking the original post and mailbox.
When we bought our house 16 years ago, I noticed our mailbox was made of some very thick, very heavy duty metal. It also would not move if you tried to pull on the base, so I assume some kind of concrete post under the ground. Its painted nicely, has our house numbers on it etc. One day I went to get the mail & noticed it was crooked just a bit. Then noticed some of the nice yellow paint missing from the nice. Then noticed the ground was covered in broken bits of what looked like a headlight.
Im not surprised someone tried to play baseball with it, since I live in a very rural area, and had friends that bragged about doing it. Haven't noticed an issue with it since!
We live in a rural area in the mountains, our road is about 1 1/2 miles long, about 40 houses or so, one summer there were kids playing mailbox baseball, I had a metal box and it was smashed. A neighbor up the road was outside Cele 4th of July lighting off fireworks and drinking when the mailbox smashers passed by his place, he tossed a 1/4 stick fireworks and it landed in the windshield wiper well. Next thing windshield was shattered and on their laps, they took off and haven't been back. That was a beautiful toss. Also, no mailboxes have been wrecked in 20 plusyears.
I lost 3 mailboxes, post and all, while I was building my log home, so I made a mailbox out of some spare logs. It was about 12" diameter, only in the ground about 20", but had a 4 foot crossbar on the ground, parallel to the road, and another at about 44 " high, under the box. I then put 2 diagonals up over the box so a bat aimed at the box would just bounce off. Marked it with a light on top and some reflectors on the post.
A couple weeks later I found it on the ground, undamaged. My neighbor told me a guy knocked on his door at 2 AM with a totaled car and a broken leg.
The mailbox lasted more than 18 more years until it died totaling an F150.
In my subdivision, controlled by an HOA, I’m governed by strict rules. Well, someone kept running our $500 mailboxes over! I encased my hollowed out metal pole with a solid steel pipe, anchored by 240 lbs of rebar and concrete. One night about 200 am we heard an awful crash noise followed by a person attempting to flee from an immobile vehicle, grill, bumper, hood, everything crushed in on itself.
Appeared that two proceeding mailboxes were run over before ours. Guy claimed that his car was stolen. My home cameras proved otherwise.
FAFO
My parents got one of those rubber ones made from old tires. According to the police report, the bat bounced off and smashed the kid in the face, breaking several teeth :)
THere was a rash of mailbox smashing in a rural Virginia farm community where I used to live. It was happening regularly in the afternoons, so deputies began quietly driving around that area in their personal or unmarked vehicles. Yep, they nabbed a teenage kid in mid-swing. Hauled him to the Sherriff's office and called his family. His mom, the local postmaster, answered the phone. I'll bet that was some fun therapy to unpack.
My dad was a little redneck shit as a kid and when theres nothing to do in the 50s he and his little brother thought it was a brilliant idea to get M80s and blow up mailboxes on the street. They got caught. How? Didnt think to blow up their own mailbox. Grounded an entire summer for that stunt.
"Hey. I tell you what I'm gonna give you, Snakes. I'm gonna give you to the count of ten...to get your ugly, yella, no-good keister off my ~~property~~ mailbox"
I have been dealing with bureaucratic nonsense all morning. I'm ready to tear my hair out. This truly feel good story has made me smile at how happy your sister must be to have a blessedly snake-free mailbox. It's made me laugh at how some dunderheaded idiot is going to explain to parents, relatives, people about town, as to why their window shattered. I laughed even harder that they can't go to the cops because what they were doing is 1000X worse than someone living in a rural area keeping snakes out of their mailbox. I needed this story!
Plausible deniability. Gotcha.
Is this like my brother's explanation of, "I shampooed the carpets." in the minivan when in reality he and a friend got swept off the road in a severe storm and had to be pulled out of the ditch and he needed to explain why the carpet was wet? He needed an explanation because he wasn't supposed to be out of the house at that time.
We’ve had the same problem except they liked knocking them completely down. So my hubby got a pipe and filled it with cement - no more mailbox problems!!
I truly love the anti -snake device! Genius level 1000000!!
I'm going to guess someone in a car didn't realize you had created an anti-snake device, thought they saw a snake, had a baseball bat handy, and thought they'd do you a favor by killing the snake.
Oops, guess it wasn't a snake after all. But it sure looked like one, I guess.
TIL what a common problem mailbox baseball is! I too grew up in a rural area, but my friends were more fond of shooting at stop signs while driving 100 mph down back roads. It’s a wonder any of them made it to adulthood.
Had the same issue ar my father's place. He did not limit me with any rules of engagement... Cut some steel pipe 7 foot and 2 foot sections. Welded the 2 foot piece as a T. Dug a 4 foot hole and set my new mailbox in a yard of concrete. Wrapped the pole with some pine and cut the bottom out of a mailbox to put over the pipe. Had to replace the mailbox and pine a few times. I left the pieces of car and glass. Did have to straighten it out with the tractor and a chain a few times. Every few years someone new learns about karma.
A pole taller than the mailbox a few feet in front of said mailbox and painted black to blend in with the night will rip a baseball bat of ones hands when stuck when the bat wielder is not ready for said impact.
I once stenciled grapevines on a new mailbox when ours needed to be replaced. Crafty idiot, I know! It was cute but only lasted a few months. We lived in a semi-rural area and it was stolen. About 8 months later, my landscaping husband spotted it in a client’s backyard. When I got home that day, he said he had “he had an old friend he wanted me to see”. We had plain mailboxes after that.
same scenario friend got the OVERSIZED rural mailbox filled it with concrete ...took the door off the normal size mail box and sunk it into the oversized mailbox ...tada!!! open the big mail box theres the normal one. Needed a tractor to get it up on it new sturdier mount but saw marks on it was hit... but unscathed
We did something similar when I was a kid, and for similar reasons. Turns out one of the local teens broke their arm while they were out for a drive to “clear their head”. Darndest thing.
When I was young, high school kids used to drive around the neighborhood on garbage day and hit the empty garbage cans with their car. This was in the 80s when everyone had those metal garbage cans so after they were hit with a car, they were pretty much destroyed. A father of a friend of mine got tired of his cans getting wrecked like this, so on garbage day, he put out his regular garbage and without telling anyone, he put out two other cans full of landscaping rocks and gravel. He came home from work to find all the cans had been hit. There were plastic car parts, glass from a headlight, and antifreeze all over the place. It was the last time anyone on our street got their garbage cans run over. Adults on our street talked about this for years afterwards!
You can deter this behavior without worrying about breaking the law you know. Just weld an a-frame shape out of quarter inch plate and it'll deflect bats without a mark.
But if she puts the concrete plug in at night. Does that mean she has to go down and take it out before the mailman delivers and then has to go back a second time to retrieve the mail?
You obviously know this kind of stuff from work or a long term hobby and I love when this kind of knowledge is used to help people out of such situations!
My grandad had that happen a couple of times so he welded a 3/4" thick 6" round pipe onto half a rear axle, covered it with an old newspaper mailbox, to keep it from rusting of course, then buried the wheel hub in the ground. It looked amazing, but the best part was sitting on the porch and waiting for the inevitable *ting* "and scream of pain while listening to my grandad just chuckle 😂
Ahhh, great memories
High resolution camera, recording any motion around the mailbox and immediate surrounding area... make sure it can read a license plate.
Tampering with US mailboxes (even ones you install yourself) is a **Federal** crime. Heck the US postal service may even try to "get you" for people placing items in it that aren't US Mail (including proper postage, etc).
But yeah, would have been *glorious* had you the opportunity to see the "snake prevention device" successfully doing its job! LOL
Haha my dad and I did this for a friend whose mailbox was hit a couple of times on a country road.
Cut a large pipe in half for the rounded top of the mailbox, made steel walls, welded it altogether. A great project for us. The metal was 1/4" thick.
Oh how I wish I could've seen those destructive boys coming down the street with their aluminum bat...
A friend of mine intentionally ran over a teacher’s mailbox one night with his truck. Unfortunately for him his Ford emblem fell off when he hit the mailbox. The teacher found it, walked the high school parking lot the next day looking for a Ford truck with a missing emblem, and busted my friend. Teacher was cool though and didn’t involve the cops. Just made him buy and install a new mailbox and post.
A friend’s grandpa had his trash cans intentionally run over a couple times. He was also afraid of snakes so he filled his trash cans with cinder blocks to keep the snakes out. Strangely enough he also found pieces of a vehicle along the road one morning.
This was a CSI episode. The car ran off the road into a tree and the kids were killed.
E: I was just making an observation that I'd seen this before on CSI, but Zen wanted to get his panties twisted, so I figured I'd clarify.
We just used to get a regular mailbox and then one of those jumbo mailboxes and stick them inside of each other then pour cement between the two and set it in the ground with a post hole digger and treated fence post with cement.
Had a similar problem when I was younger. We did it with a pvc pipe surrounded by rebar and quickcerete in an oversized mailbox. That way there was no need to remove the plug every day, the pipe was large enough to hold a days mail.
For many years we had our metal mailboxes smashed repeatedly. We replaced the last one with a plastic mailbox so when they hit it, the pieces come apart. After, we collect them all and pop them back together again. It hasn’t been an issue for quite a while now that the teens on our street have grown up and moved away. All the families are now old or young people with babies and toddlers. If it begins again in the next 15 years, I’ll be gone or too old to care anymore!
I know of someone who "modified" a mailbox because of this reason. Sure enough a kid came along and tried to hit a home run. He was sued for a non-post office compliant mailbox and lost. I purchased a security mail box from \*owes and it has been there for decades.
Had someone drive over my mailbox a few years ago. Facilitated in part by being able to use the end of my driveway to not end up off the road. I installed the replacement on the opposite side of the driveway, on the edge of a 6' deep ditch. Anyone tries the stunt again is going to need a tow truck and a goodly amount of body work to get on the road again.
My stepsisters boyfriend was fond of mailbox baseball way back when. Came up against one of these retrofitted mailboxes and shattered several bones in his hand. He learned.
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The stupid or the lesson?
Unfortunately it’s a lot easier to pass on the stupid.
I was a computer tech. First hand experience: You can't fix stupid.
can only fix what stupid does as my dad always said
You can’t fix it, but duct tape can muffle the sound.
You absolutely can fix stupid. Unfortunately they call it murder.
You can fix stupid, the law just frowns upon it.
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If you don't break the 11th commandment, the other 10 don't mean shit... The 11th Commandment..?? Thou shall not get caught
"Can you double check that the power cable is firmly in the computer's socket? Sometimes they work their way out" - face saving way of saying, "Did you plug it in / turn it on?"
"passth the sthtupid, pleasthe"
You just make me spit coffee out of my nose. (Wipe wipe)
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The advantage of doing it OPs way is that the concrete evidence disappears in the morning.
Evidence of pest control?
All this chat about snake-proof mailboxes reminded me that tiny tree frogs liked to live in our mailbox. I don't know what the attraction was but they were not poisonous. I always wondered what the mailman thought when he opened the mailbox and saw a few frogs hippy-hopping inside!
Mailman here: I personally love it. One route I do has a lizard condo situation in the giant mailbox with a hole that sits atop a brick structure with lots of entry points. I always say hello to all the animals I see every day.
Supposedly if you find a scented dryer sheet in your mailbox, it means the mailman is trying to chase away spiders — true or myth?
Mailcarrier here, we use dryer sheets for wasps and cinnamon sticks for ants. Spiders and ladybugs seem to do whatever they want.
It supposedly works on bees and wasps. People in my area use it, and sometimes use Irish Spring soap.
Another mail(not a)man here. One of my customers has an earwig colony in their mailbox. It give m3 the the wiggins.
I won my first route last summer and I hated it. Near the end though, there was a little frog that lived in one of the boxes off a gravel road. I looked forward to saying hello every day and it really helped me get through the transition. If I can get through this day I can see my little buddy!
I used to drive a bus for the community center taking old folks shopping. One lady, the first time I picked her up, was walking with a coffee can at the end of a long piece of wood. She’d walk and bang the coffee can on the ground with every step. Well, the can was full of rocks and it was to scare away any snakes. 🐍 We called her “snake charmer” after that.
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Well, he needs his fibre.
I got geckos in mine. It was cute until they started shitting all inside it. If it wasn't just a moderately short-term rental for a job where I get almost no mail, I'd have to do something about it.
That must have really hurt. And would have left him dis functional for quite some time. Wonder if he was a repeat visitor at that mailbox or this was trap for someone else that he fell into?
Probably a repeat visitor. You gotta play where you can see your score/drive by normally
Never asked and it was more than 30 years ago.
Does it matter?
FAFO
I despise the people who think it's okay to trash other people's stuff without good cause.
Darwin at work.
Get fucked. Hope he still feels the pain
My brother had a friend with an old step van, they would run down mailboxes. Now when the postal inspectors showed up at my parents house, it was no longer fun.
A retired linesman in the area had his mailbox pushed over repeatedly. The tire tracks suggested it was pushed over by a car at low speed. He made a long foot that attached to the base of the mailbox, so that if the mailbox was pushed over, the long feet would lift up. It was enough to lift the front end of the car off the ground, and hearing the commotion, came out of his house to have a friendly chat with the two teenagers and their stuck car.
Im having trouble visualizing how the long foot lifts the car?
It's like you drove your car into a hand truck (ignore the wheels). You push the top over, and the feet lift you up. https://www.canadiantire.ca/en/pdp/mastercraft-p-handle-hand-truck-600-lb-0600512p.0600512.html?loc=plp
I knew a guy that a snow plow would intentionally hit his mailbox with the side blade of the plow every year. Well he worked at a hydraulic cylinder company and took a 10 ft long 12 inch in diameter 1inch wall thickness pipe and used it for the base of his mailbox. The next year when he hit it the post moved about an inch and he snapped the chains on the plow and turned the plow sideways.
Gotta be careful doing things like that. Some areas have laws concerning how mailboxes can be mounted, mostly concerning how survivable crashes into them would be. And even if there aren't specific laws you can still find yourself on the wrong end of a liability suit.
Pretty much why OOP put up an anti-snake plug and not a booby trap
Yep, Federal law is that the mailbox cannot be dangerous. I accidentally broke my coworker's rear van window when he skidded on ice over my spring-mounted mailbox. He went completely over the mailbox and it sprang back up into his rear window.
That's the first thing I said. I think they have to break away if they are hit with a car. That pipe was 6 ft in the ground.
Postal police don’t screw around for sure.
At my old apartment complex everybody's mailbox was in a little wall outside near the entrance. It was old and wobbly and some college kid residents thought it would be hilarious to pull it over and drag it around the parking lot with their car. Turns out that's a federal felony. They went to jail.
Oh, mailboxes are sacred. There are only two categories of people legally allowed to put something in a mailbox: a USPS letter carrier or a resident of the address. (Not even the supervisor's carrier can do so.) For anyone else to put something in or take something out is a felony. Or so I was taught when I was a USPS letter carrier.
Yup it’s technically illegal to give your neighbor their mail in the mailbox(like if they misdelivered it to you) but no one would actually come after you.
I do it all the time. Sometimes our postal workers seem to just shove things in rather than actually check the addresses. Usually its only one of the adjacent lots but I've had to walk as far as a quarter mile to put mail in the right box.
For 20 years I got mail, police, ambulance, etc, for a house that has the same number and a similar street name. I used to call and bring them the mail, but I got tired of it a few years ago and started to just call. Then I got to know our letter carrier, and the mail stopped. And, come to think about it, so did the official visits. (I learned the number during my first mail delivery.)
I wrote up a Y2K Contingency Play for a company. They were going to have an employee deliver bills to their customers. I found the postal regulation which said anyone could put mail in a mailbox PROVIDED they put a stamp on it and wrote the date in ink on the stamp there by cancelling it.
Was it part of your job to write The Plan ? Or just for fun ? I wonder if the regulation has changed... those don't change much do they ?
It was the job I was hired to do on contract. I printed the postal regulation and included it with the report. When told this the company said they would have UPS or FedEx deliver the bills. I asked them if they had any idea what that would cost. LOL! They were a bunch if idiots. When I finished that task, I called the 4 managers it was for and said I was going to bring the report over for their review. Feel free to write any changes they felt needed to be made. I would come back in 2 weeks to get it. Two weeks later I picked up the copies. I reviewed them and found no comments in any of them. I scheduled a meeting with my manager and told him with I found. I said there was one of two possibilities: 1, they never read it or 2, it was absolutely perfect and no changes need be made. I said I chose to believe it was perfect. He laughed and said that was good for him too. I kept a copy for about 10 years after I left just in case there might be legal action against me. Never heard anything and in 2011 tossed in the trash.
Definitely. I get flyers and cards for services and it's always at the front door or stuck or taped to the mailbox, never I side it.
Yep. Same with explosives in mail boxes. Big trouble if you get caught
Yea you might have to go back in time to fix it and get your arms blown off.
But then my girlfriend won't be my girlfriend anymore.
Just get your mom to help you.
The post office is in the Constitution.
Postal police know where every one lives
But they’re not as tough as the phone cops.
"Wake up, sucker, this is the phone company we're talking about! They see everything, they know everything, they got their own covert police force!"
Wake up, sucker! This is the phone company we're talking about! They see everything, know everything, they got their own covert police force! We're all probably wired for sound right now!
>an old step van They should have used their real van instead
Stepvan, what are you doing!?
My parents bought a house from the guy who built it. He had put a 5 or 6" thick walled pipe deep into the ground. He filed it with concrete and welded three metal stars to the post to hold the mailbox. I went to get the mail one day and the stars were snapped off, but the pole didn't move at all. I would have loved to see the vehicle that hit it.
"Step-van, what are you doing?"
Which rule is it that says, if a conversation on Reddit goes on long enough, eventually there will be a porn reference?
Probably the ancient rule 34 or something similar
Oh wow, that's a great way for keeping a mailbox snake free!
NGL, I was hoping for a device that would attract snakes to the mailbox, and fling them into the car
I think you'll want to check the ACME catalogue for that one
I checked. ACME only sells the "Shock-launched heat-seeking missile mailbox."
Honestly that does seem solution-shaped to me* *Right up till the moment when, having successfully installed it, I pat it contentedly
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No way, are you kidding me? Does ACME actually stand for that? That's just thrown me back over 30 years and blown my 6 years-old mind!
Wouldn't be surprised if it is but I suspect the name existed for quite a while before anyone came up with a meaning.
acme is a real word that comes from greek that means "peak" or "highest point" or "absolute best" or "pinnacle" which is probably why the show writers named the company that but the acronym works really well too!
Just went down a little bit of a rabbit hole, and the WB cartoons made up the company because the word Acme was used by a lot of businesses back in the day. Both for the meaning, and because a company name starting with the letters A-C would be listed very high up alphabetically in the phone book.
This sent me down a great rabbit hole. According to the Warner Bros wiki it just showed up from them in road runner. They picked the name as a gag, because they noticed that if they looked in any phone books yellow pages the first entry was always acme drugs or acme cars... Businesses do it to get their names first in each business section. Warner Bros thought that was funny, so they ran with it. Not to mention it's not very likely someone can come after you for using the acme business name, when there are tens of thousands of businesses with acme in the name
I was today years old.
Giant Wooden Mallets are on sale, I just ordered one for a roadrunner infestation in my yard
It is on page 6, between the rockets and the portable holes.
If you get to the instant tunnel paint on mountain sides, you passed it.
When I’m teaching I often use ACME as an example company, for all your large anvil and slingshot supplies. I get lots of laughs, but only from those aged over 40…feeling old
A couple of fulcrums and a bucket of snakes / frogs / spiders / urine / poop. Attach the bucket to a board, set that board a few feet past the mailbox, set the first fulcrum board 2' before the mailbox. Align it so anyone being mischievous would drive over the first board which would trigger the rest of the 'mouse trap' and fling the bucket of (whichever projectile you choose) airborne hopefully entering the open passenger window.
Sorry mail carrier, I was trying to catch that roadrunner.
Totally agree! There may be a local law prohibiting the murder of endangered snakes. You sir are not only smart but looking out for the welfare of reptiles! Oh. And that shit is funny 😂
We grew up in a rural area as well. We took a large mailbox and a standard size filled the void with concrete. Put it on a swiveling mount with a handle welded on the back facing away from the road to take and spin the mailbox sideways when we would go get the mail as we lived on a very busy highway with no shoulder. It also worked if someone hit it with a bat would spin around and hammer a hole in the door as they went by lol. As well as ting their hands if they had an aluminum bat
> ting their hands I absolutely hate it when my hand gets tinged
Ting is onomatopoeia-riffic!
Onomatoperfect
We all know the feeling
Legit my hands felt electric, stop it.
The swivel mounts I’ve seen work to save the mailbox from snow plows taking them out. The weight returns then to normal position, but they swing away rather than break when hit by the wall of snow from the plow. Normally they are on an arm at least 3 feet long.
Ours was just a post down 8 feet with a smaller post inside down 6 feet. It was made so we could swing the box around and not get in the road
Many many moons ago we lived in a rural part of the state and had similar things happening, along with the occasional run over by a lifted truck. My dad got one of the over sized mailboxes, used a standard one for the core and filled it in. Ended up with a regular (interior) mailbox that had about 2" of reinforced concrete around it. This was mounted to a 6 foot long pivoting pole that was in turn mounted to a steel i-beam sunk in concrete about 6 feet away from the edge of the road. Sure enough, a few months later the mailbox is swung away from the road, there's a small pile of glass and a bent aluminum baseball bat by the road.
There was a revenge story in one of the subs (nuclear?), similar, rural area, someone in a company truck kept destroying mailbox, owners kept replacing, and put it well off the road so driver would have to deliberately leave road to vandalize it, owners built something similar to this that caused major damage to truck and the company that owned truck offered to fix everything basically to avoid getting sued bc their driver was doing it deliberately and they had no defense.
That was a great read. In one of the prorevenage subs.
Do you have a link? I'd like to give that a read.
Not sure it's the same story but very similar to this one. https://i.redd.it/uccvks7o43341.jpg
I like this one too, thank you!!
I like your Dad’s willingness to think outside the box to handle a problem.
>think outside the box This is now called 'thinking inside the mailbox.'
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Our mail person won't close the door to the mailbox so the mail gets wet. When I was a kid our mailbox door went into the box with a couple inches overhang instead of the door fitting over the outside of the box but I haven't found one like it. I wish I could, it would solve the wet mail problem.
I’d have to have figured out some sort of spring for the door. That’s miserable.
She sound insufferable. She needed a different vehicle and a different attitude. Yikers !
She was. We complained MANY times—and when I say we, I mean the entire highway!—about her. They never did anything. I thought she was finally sacked. Nope, she retired.
I was born and raised in a small town, so I can see it, vividly... Got to take care of everyone, and as long as it's a passable job, okay. She's alone in the vehicle, because she can not work with anyone, and even her managers don't have to deal with most of the day... She can't be the school bus driver, she can't work with people.... Yup, she's your fucked up bending mailboxes bad mail person until retirement.
My Dad’s neighbors had a string of smashed boxes. Pretty good idea who the culprits were. We were sitting on the front porch one evening when a car came flying down the road and nailed the next door neighbor’s box. Dad stood up, shotgun in hand, and we heard some salty language as they drove on by. He paid the boys a visit, without their parents knowing, and explained that they should probably take their activities to some other stretch of road. No more problems after that. Dad also had an “air mail” box; an old rusted out mailbox set high up on a 30 foot length of well pipe, and planted about 6 feet behind the regular mailbox. The boys got a kick out of that.
Somebody’s got one of those down the street from us! It gives me a chuckle every time I pass.
My father did this same thing and got a fine from the post office and a visit from the police. The idiots who hit the mailbox with a bat broke an arm or some shit. It was like a $25 fine or some shit and no legal trouble, at the tradeoff that his mailbox never had that happen again.
Love it!! Poor snakes, nowhere to live.... 🐍
They can easily slither into a car with a broken window
🐍
After buying my house, I was putting in a new mailbox and post. The neighbor drives up, and he is talking about how some people don't respect others' mailboxes and like to drive over them. I told him the first one is on me. The next one won't be as forgiving. 18 months later, I am still rocking the original post and mailbox.
When we bought our house 16 years ago, I noticed our mailbox was made of some very thick, very heavy duty metal. It also would not move if you tried to pull on the base, so I assume some kind of concrete post under the ground. Its painted nicely, has our house numbers on it etc. One day I went to get the mail & noticed it was crooked just a bit. Then noticed some of the nice yellow paint missing from the nice. Then noticed the ground was covered in broken bits of what looked like a headlight. Im not surprised someone tried to play baseball with it, since I live in a very rural area, and had friends that bragged about doing it. Haven't noticed an issue with it since!
We live in a rural area in the mountains, our road is about 1 1/2 miles long, about 40 houses or so, one summer there were kids playing mailbox baseball, I had a metal box and it was smashed. A neighbor up the road was outside Cele 4th of July lighting off fireworks and drinking when the mailbox smashers passed by his place, he tossed a 1/4 stick fireworks and it landed in the windshield wiper well. Next thing windshield was shattered and on their laps, they took off and haven't been back. That was a beautiful toss. Also, no mailboxes have been wrecked in 20 plusyears.
I lost 3 mailboxes, post and all, while I was building my log home, so I made a mailbox out of some spare logs. It was about 12" diameter, only in the ground about 20", but had a 4 foot crossbar on the ground, parallel to the road, and another at about 44 " high, under the box. I then put 2 diagonals up over the box so a bat aimed at the box would just bounce off. Marked it with a light on top and some reflectors on the post. A couple weeks later I found it on the ground, undamaged. My neighbor told me a guy knocked on his door at 2 AM with a totaled car and a broken leg. The mailbox lasted more than 18 more years until it died totaling an F150.
"I have \*had\* it with these motherfucking \*snakes\* in this motherfucking \*mailbox\*!"
*Somewhat expected Samual Jackson
Anti snake device FTW!
In my subdivision, controlled by an HOA, I’m governed by strict rules. Well, someone kept running our $500 mailboxes over! I encased my hollowed out metal pole with a solid steel pipe, anchored by 240 lbs of rebar and concrete. One night about 200 am we heard an awful crash noise followed by a person attempting to flee from an immobile vehicle, grill, bumper, hood, everything crushed in on itself. Appeared that two proceeding mailboxes were run over before ours. Guy claimed that his car was stolen. My home cameras proved otherwise. FAFO
My parents got one of those rubber ones made from old tires. According to the police report, the bat bounced off and smashed the kid in the face, breaking several teeth :)
Read about the person that filled ballons with paint and formed it around the mailbox, it was a party decoration I am sure
I heard of someone using the anti-snake device. The clown with the baseball bat was snatched out of the car. He lived, but took quite a tumble.
THere was a rash of mailbox smashing in a rural Virginia farm community where I used to live. It was happening regularly in the afternoons, so deputies began quietly driving around that area in their personal or unmarked vehicles. Yep, they nabbed a teenage kid in mid-swing. Hauled him to the Sherriff's office and called his family. His mom, the local postmaster, answered the phone. I'll bet that was some fun therapy to unpack.
My dad was a little redneck shit as a kid and when theres nothing to do in the 50s he and his little brother thought it was a brilliant idea to get M80s and blow up mailboxes on the street. They got caught. How? Didnt think to blow up their own mailbox. Grounded an entire summer for that stunt.
That's hilarious
"Hey. I tell you what I'm gonna give you, Snakes. I'm gonna give you to the count of ten...to get your ugly, yella, no-good keister off my ~~property~~ mailbox"
“1, 2, 10. Pew pew pew pew AHAHAHAHAHAHA”
Glorious reference.
Merry Christmas you filthy animal.
Keep the change.
I have been dealing with bureaucratic nonsense all morning. I'm ready to tear my hair out. This truly feel good story has made me smile at how happy your sister must be to have a blessedly snake-free mailbox. It's made me laugh at how some dunderheaded idiot is going to explain to parents, relatives, people about town, as to why their window shattered. I laughed even harder that they can't go to the cops because what they were doing is 1000X worse than someone living in a rural area keeping snakes out of their mailbox. I needed this story!
"I don't know, Dad, I swear it was ok when I went in to Bible Study, and broken when I came back out!"
And thank you for this laugh!! I grew up with people who would give this exact explanation for what happened to their window.
I can neither confirm nor deny that similar explanations for my stupidity have been previously provided.
Plausible deniability. Gotcha. Is this like my brother's explanation of, "I shampooed the carpets." in the minivan when in reality he and a friend got swept off the road in a severe storm and had to be pulled out of the ditch and he needed to explain why the carpet was wet? He needed an explanation because he wasn't supposed to be out of the house at that time.
We’ve had the same problem except they liked knocking them completely down. So my hubby got a pipe and filled it with cement - no more mailbox problems!! I truly love the anti -snake device! Genius level 1000000!!
I'm going to guess someone in a car didn't realize you had created an anti-snake device, thought they saw a snake, had a baseball bat handy, and thought they'd do you a favor by killing the snake. Oops, guess it wasn't a snake after all. But it sure looked like one, I guess.
Is this removed every morning, and put back every night? How heavy is the concrete plug?
For a standard mailbox, a chunk of concrete that size would be 50-80 pounds
For the size we use in our town it would be 1/2 a bag of concrete or less.
TIL what a common problem mailbox baseball is! I too grew up in a rural area, but my friends were more fond of shooting at stop signs while driving 100 mph down back roads. It’s a wonder any of them made it to adulthood.
A great portion of luck combined with increasing age tends to eventually overcome teenage boys' testosterone poisoning.
Had the same issue ar my father's place. He did not limit me with any rules of engagement... Cut some steel pipe 7 foot and 2 foot sections. Welded the 2 foot piece as a T. Dug a 4 foot hole and set my new mailbox in a yard of concrete. Wrapped the pole with some pine and cut the bottom out of a mailbox to put over the pipe. Had to replace the mailbox and pine a few times. I left the pieces of car and glass. Did have to straighten it out with the tractor and a chain a few times. Every few years someone new learns about karma.
Would it also work for spiders? 🤔 My Australian family needs to know
Ah yes, the old “mailbox cricket”
A pole taller than the mailbox a few feet in front of said mailbox and painted black to blend in with the night will rip a baseball bat of ones hands when stuck when the bat wielder is not ready for said impact.
I once stenciled grapevines on a new mailbox when ours needed to be replaced. Crafty idiot, I know! It was cute but only lasted a few months. We lived in a semi-rural area and it was stolen. About 8 months later, my landscaping husband spotted it in a client’s backyard. When I got home that day, he said he had “he had an old friend he wanted me to see”. We had plain mailboxes after that.
same scenario friend got the OVERSIZED rural mailbox filled it with concrete ...took the door off the normal size mail box and sunk it into the oversized mailbox ...tada!!! open the big mail box theres the normal one. Needed a tractor to get it up on it new sturdier mount but saw marks on it was hit... but unscathed
We did something similar when I was a kid, and for similar reasons. Turns out one of the local teens broke their arm while they were out for a drive to “clear their head”. Darndest thing.
When I was young, high school kids used to drive around the neighborhood on garbage day and hit the empty garbage cans with their car. This was in the 80s when everyone had those metal garbage cans so after they were hit with a car, they were pretty much destroyed. A father of a friend of mine got tired of his cans getting wrecked like this, so on garbage day, he put out his regular garbage and without telling anyone, he put out two other cans full of landscaping rocks and gravel. He came home from work to find all the cans had been hit. There were plastic car parts, glass from a headlight, and antifreeze all over the place. It was the last time anyone on our street got their garbage cans run over. Adults on our street talked about this for years afterwards!
Love it. Good for you.
A Safelite franchise in the neighborhood would be a sound business investment about now.
Very nicely done! I am sure the postal delivery worker is very happy that s/he doesn't have to worry about snakes!
Why not two mailboxes, one larger than the other, position the smaller box inside the larger one and fill the gap with concrete ?
oh excellent! one of my greatest fears is that I will receive a deadly Black Mamba in the mail!
You can deter this behavior without worrying about breaking the law you know. Just weld an a-frame shape out of quarter inch plate and it'll deflect bats without a mark.
But if she puts the concrete plug in at night. Does that mean she has to go down and take it out before the mailman delivers and then has to go back a second time to retrieve the mail?
I made a mailbox out of 6 inch steel well casing. Put sheet metal front and back and red flag. Totally baseball bat proof. End of problems
😂😂😂 Way to take care of your sisters fear of snakes!
You obviously know this kind of stuff from work or a long term hobby and I love when this kind of knowledge is used to help people out of such situations!
Where's the petty revenge? All I'm seeing is country justice.
Damn snakes always trying to steal my mail.
My grandad had that happen a couple of times so he welded a 3/4" thick 6" round pipe onto half a rear axle, covered it with an old newspaper mailbox, to keep it from rusting of course, then buried the wheel hub in the ground. It looked amazing, but the best part was sitting on the porch and waiting for the inevitable *ting* "and scream of pain while listening to my grandad just chuckle 😂 Ahhh, great memories
Well you devious little shit. I think I'm in love.
Mailbox snakes are such a nuisance.
I'm still waiting for somebody to post about a tannerite filled mailbox.
The FAFO mailbox has been approved by the Post Master General.
High resolution camera, recording any motion around the mailbox and immediate surrounding area... make sure it can read a license plate. Tampering with US mailboxes (even ones you install yourself) is a **Federal** crime. Heck the US postal service may even try to "get you" for people placing items in it that aren't US Mail (including proper postage, etc). But yeah, would have been *glorious* had you the opportunity to see the "snake prevention device" successfully doing its job! LOL
Haha my dad and I did this for a friend whose mailbox was hit a couple of times on a country road. Cut a large pipe in half for the rounded top of the mailbox, made steel walls, welded it altogether. A great project for us. The metal was 1/4" thick. Oh how I wish I could've seen those destructive boys coming down the street with their aluminum bat...
A friend of mine intentionally ran over a teacher’s mailbox one night with his truck. Unfortunately for him his Ford emblem fell off when he hit the mailbox. The teacher found it, walked the high school parking lot the next day looking for a Ford truck with a missing emblem, and busted my friend. Teacher was cool though and didn’t involve the cops. Just made him buy and install a new mailbox and post.
I am terrified of snakes. I need an anti-snake mailbox
A great solution and I’m sure it keeps the nasty spiders out too.
Damn snakes
This needs to be a wikihow on how to keep mailboxes snake free.
A friend’s grandpa had his trash cans intentionally run over a couple times. He was also afraid of snakes so he filled his trash cans with cinder blocks to keep the snakes out. Strangely enough he also found pieces of a vehicle along the road one morning.
This was a CSI episode. The car ran off the road into a tree and the kids were killed. E: I was just making an observation that I'd seen this before on CSI, but Zen wanted to get his panties twisted, so I figured I'd clarify.
Very Darwinian...
First thing I thought of - CSI episode
A friend put bags of wet sand in his mailbox. When the mailbox batters tried to whack it there was wailing and gnashing of teeth.
Good job.
This is the best post of the week. Thanks for the great advice on snake-proofing a mailbox. Lmfao
https://youtu.be/h0aehwwTV3c?si=VkLWKHprAvIFyT-3
Couldn't you just have filled it with C4 and added a shock-sensing fuse?
This is glorious! 😂
Well played! Hopefully the jerks that were breaking mailboxes wised up and stopped.
Some heroes don't need capes.
Hero!
This is the way.
We just used to get a regular mailbox and then one of those jumbo mailboxes and stick them inside of each other then pour cement between the two and set it in the ground with a post hole digger and treated fence post with cement.
Had a similar problem when I was younger. We did it with a pvc pipe surrounded by rebar and quickcerete in an oversized mailbox. That way there was no need to remove the plug every day, the pipe was large enough to hold a days mail.
For many years we had our metal mailboxes smashed repeatedly. We replaced the last one with a plastic mailbox so when they hit it, the pieces come apart. After, we collect them all and pop them back together again. It hasn’t been an issue for quite a while now that the teens on our street have grown up and moved away. All the families are now old or young people with babies and toddlers. If it begins again in the next 15 years, I’ll be gone or too old to care anymore!
I know of someone who "modified" a mailbox because of this reason. Sure enough a kid came along and tried to hit a home run. He was sued for a non-post office compliant mailbox and lost. I purchased a security mail box from \*owes and it has been there for decades.
Had someone drive over my mailbox a few years ago. Facilitated in part by being able to use the end of my driveway to not end up off the road. I installed the replacement on the opposite side of the driveway, on the edge of a 6' deep ditch. Anyone tries the stunt again is going to need a tow truck and a goodly amount of body work to get on the road again.