The time my local news station ran a story about a rogue mailbox that kept getting knocked over, but nobody from the city would fix it because it was technically on private property

I was at a city council meeting in my small town in Vermont last month when a guy stood up and spent 5 minutes ranting about this exact mailbox on Elm Street, and I realized the whole absurd situation had been brewing for 6 months while every major outlet ignored it, anyone else have a hyper-local drama that just simmered under the radar?

3 comments

3 Comments

samflores29d ago

Man, I used to roll my eyes at these kinds of stories. Thought it was just bored people making a mountain out of a molehill. But after hearing one of the town maintenance guys explain how they do their routes, it clicked for me. Those plow drivers are on a tight schedule and they're not exactly aiming for mailboxes, but the snow packs up and they swing wide. Now I see that broken mailbox on Elm Street and I'm like, yep, that's six months of nobody wanting to take the blame for a bad turn. It's basically a monument to municipal stubbornness at this point.

gibson.morgan29d ago

Hell yeah, I got one for you. Nobody ever talks about the fact that those "rogue" mailboxes are almost always the result of the city plows taking corners too wide in the winter. They knock it over once, then the homeowner gets sick of waiting and sets it back up crooked or in a slightly worse spot, and then it's just asking to get hit again. That mailbox on Elm Street probably got wrecked by a plow driver that doesn't even remember doing it, and the city won't touch it because admitting it's on private property means admitting their driver caused the damage. Meanwhile, the whole town's watching this thing get mangled month after month like some kind of slow-motion demolition derby.

mark_ward29d ago

Man I finally just put a steel post in with concrete after my third mailbox got taken out by a plow. Haven't had an issue since, but I'm pretty sure I'm now the guy with the "too sturdy" mailbox on my block