The Mailbox Blockers

Photo by Christin Hume on Unsplash

This is my continuing series on “The Characters of Cedar Run”. I was planning on numbering these but I have done so many that I’ve lost count. I only have a few more to go. Enjoy!

Have you ever lived in a neighborhood where cars parked in the street? If you have a driveway, there shouldn’t be a reason for you to park in the roadway.

Maybe you have visitors and your driveway can’t accommodate all the cars. Or maybe your family has a lot of cars and they don’t all fit in the driveway.

I’ve got two stories of people that blocked my mailbox.

Mailbox Blocker #1

A family moved into the house on the south side of our house. It was a rental. They had two kids, one girl and one boy. The girl was in middle school, while the boy was in high school. They had three cars. One was a green car, which sat in the driveway near the garage door. They had a light green minivan and then they got a silver car for the boy.

The minivan usually was in the driveway behind the green car. It was always blocking the sidewalk. The city had an ordinance that said people’s cars could not block the sidewalks. But they never followed through on ticketing people.

They never used the garage. It was used for storage. I saw it open one time and it was chock full of boxes.

On occasion, they would park the minivan down at the end of the road in the cul-de-sac. Other people used that for overflow parking as well.

Once they got the car for the boy, he started parking the car between their mailbox and my mailbox.

Then, we had problems.

The mailman would never deliver mail to either mailbox if that car was there. He told me once when I confronted him that he didn’t know who owned the car. We had a driveway that was capable of holding four cars. So it would have never been our car. I told him this and said it was always the next door neighbor.

We would go days without mail because the mailman would hold our mail and not deliver it because of the neighbor’s car parked there. We were beyond frustrated.

Diagram by Matt Murray

The kids always used our driveway too to ride their bikes. The houses were situated close to each other. They came out of their patio and instead of pushing the bike across their lawn to their driveway, they used our sidewalk and our driveway. Then we put up some small fences and guess what? There was a large pine tree that was in our front yard and there was a small swatch of lawn between the tree and another bush. They decided to go through that swatch of grass and into our driveway. We couldn’t win!!

Bonus: We went on vacation for a week. We stopped our mail delivery while we were gone. Upon returning, we didn’t receive any mail on the day we requested it be started again. Turns out they gave it to the neighbor that I just talked about. Instead of them coming over and knocking on our door and giving it to us. They sent it back to the Post Office. How idiotic can people be? And the mailman told me that he would have it for us the next day. It was a huge haul.

Mailbox Blocker #2

The family eventually moved out and a woman moved in. Think our luck changed? Nope!

It wasn’t the woman’s car that was the offender this time. It was her boyfriend. She was in her forties. He was in his fifties.

She worked from home doing something in the architectural business.

The boyfriend would park his car between the mailboxes. No mail would be delivered again.

The mailman again told me he didn’t know who owned the car. Hadn’t he remembered the previous times?

I confronted the two when they were out on the patio. She laughed it off and said why can’t the mailman just go around and get out. The reason is because he is not supposed to get out. That’s why he drives along the curb driving up to the boxes so he can put the mail in. This is common sense. Why these people don’t understand any of this I don’t know.

Conclusion

Don’t let anyone ever park in front of your mailbox. You won’t get your mail. Unless you have a mailman that likes to get out of their truck every time.

Do you have any stories of people blocking your mailbox?

Until next time, happy reading!

-Matt