Got Mail?

The American mailbox

One thing in America that's still strange to me is the home mailbox.  I really miss the days of having a simple letterbox in your front door.  The mail goes straight from the postie's bag and safely into your house instead of being left in a box on the roadside for any Tom, Dick or Harry to lift out should they so desire - and sometimes, unfortunately, they do.  Even 10 Downing Street has a letterbox on the front door for pete's sake!

Mailboxes here cost a small fortune.  Especially when you live in a neighborhood where they all have to meet certain specifications, although the main specifications also seem to include a flimsy red flag to raise when you have outgoing mail in your box or a flimsy door that invariably falls open on a windy, rainy day, rendering your mail wet and maybe even blown away by the time you go to take it out of the bleedin' box! 

  

Apparently it's a 'fun' hobby for some of the misguided youth of today to drive up and down a road with a baseball bat, knocking the crap out of the lines of mailboxes.  Easy targets.  Birds love mailboxes too.  There's a handy wee perch above our particular box.  If you don't regularly put Bird B Gone on there, the top of your mailbox will have a huge pile of bird poo within a day.  I can think of better ways to spend my weekend than scraping bird poo off my mailbox or paying to get it repaired from baseball bat damage! 

Not exactly mailbox related, but oh dear!

Roadside mailboxes are exactly that.  They are right on the bleedin' road - main road, back road, no matter!  Sometimes you just miss banging into these by only a hair's breadth.  Especially if the door has fallen open in the wind and is sticking out more than usual.  It's actually against the law to damage a person's mailbox, but you can see most mailboxes alongside busy roads have lots of scratches and dents on them!   

So much to say about mailboxes I hear you say?  Who knew!  It's just another wee difference between the UK and the USA I guess :)  And I do like to talk...  Till next time people :)