First-Class Inconvenience
Is your mailbox attached to your house as ours used to be? Have you considered moving it out by the street, as we did, so the carrier wouldn’t have to walk all the way up to the house in bad weather?
Consider this first.
If you move your mailbox out to the street, you may not be able to park near it any longer. In fact, you might as well put up no parking signs on both sides of it, because the carrier will not deliver to you if any vehicle is parked close to your new mail box.
The carrier who used to walk up to your house to deliver mail suddenly won’t walk around a parked car to reach a mailbox at the curb.
And once you’ve established streetside service, you can’t change back.
My husband and I put up a curbside box for a carrier we liked. He had brought our mail for several years and had always been friendly.
One day about two years ago, he gave us a mailbox and asked us to put it up for him. It would make mail delivery more convenient for him, he said. He asked us several more times until we finally put the box up, thinking we were doing him a friendly favor.
Not once did he mention we would no longer be able to get our mail if anyone parked by the box, or that once we located the box at the curb we could not move it.
We would have given the matter of putting up a mailbox and its location more thought if we had been properly and fairly informed.
Then we got a new carrier who wrote on my mail to inform us that a car had been parked by the mail box and we would no longer receive mail if we parked there in the future. The car belonged to a guest.
When my husband tried to talk to the defacer of my letter, he waved my husband off and drove away.
When I called up the Postal Service about the matter they told me that because we installed a curbside box our route was now a motor route. They also told me that because so many neighbors had put up the Postal Service’s curbside boxes at the Postal Service’s request, new residents who moved into the neighborhood would have to put up curbside boxes, too.
In fact, the person on the phone said, we were pretty fortunate to have been given the box at no cost in the first place.
What ever happened to the Pony Express?
MEMO: Your Turn is a feature of the Wednesday and Saturday Opinion pages. To submit a Your Turn column for consideration, contact Rebecca Nappi at 459-5496 or Doug Floyd at 459-5466 or write Your Turn, The Spokesman-Review, P.O. Box 2160, Spokane, WA 99210-1615.