Ahhhhhh. The old days. Casing and drill pipe and anchor chain mailbox supports. Casing barbecues. Boilers made out of hundreds of dollars of exotic metal flange gaskets. Which somehow cost us zip.
Steve
You should move to where the mailbox is on the house.
I am starting to put RETURN TO SENDER on chronic mailers. Capital One refused to bump my credit limit on a credit card five years ago after I had a perfect payment record with them. I cancelled the card. They're STILL sending me shit. I'm going to start taking their return envelope, fill it with other stuff, and send it back to them so they will have to pay for the excess weight. MAYBE they will take the hint and take me off their mailing list.
Maybe not.
Steve
But that would not be rural anymore.
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Well, you don't go to town anyway? That's what we do--sounds as though you've roughly the same trip distance as we and we've had the box in town since grandparents sometime back in the '20s (at that time the impetus was that the nearest delivery point was within a mile of town anyway, so if had to go that far were essentially to town, anyway.
Since, the advantage of dry, no rural box to maintain/repair (how much time and $$ have you wasted on this box not to mention the aggravation?), no security problems, no vacation overflow problems, etc., etc., ... There are many advantages against some disadvantage.
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It would be quite unusual if the boxes weren't available for collecting mail 24/7 even though the PO itself is closed--most rural PO's in very small areas have gone to the banks of boxes somewhere on the outside of the building; those that aren't generally leave the lobby open.
I suppose there could still be some that don't have access, but they must be rare any more...
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Our PO Boxes are only available when the lobby is open, that's 9 AM to
4:30 PM. A long time ago, the lobby was open 24/7, but when some idiot thought it would be fun to put something burning down the inside mail slot, all post offices in the area now close the lobby at night.BR wrote: ...
Time to get your congressman to get some pork and put in the outside boxes, then...
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Same here - none of the rural post offices in my area provide box access after 6pm. The 24/7 access would likely be provided where security cameras are installed - the little offices in my area operate on a shoestring budget so cameras are of the question.
sounds like a wonderful town.
s
Casing bbq??? WAY too small. 'round these parts we use 500 gallon propane tanks converted to trailer smokers.
You can hang a lot of baby backs in a 500 gallon tank.
s
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As for the snow-blower, if you coil about a thousand feet of barbed wire around the base and that gets sucked up in the blower's impellers...
I do that all the time. I remove anything with my name and stuff the return envelope with papers from another offer. Credit card company may get the offer for cheap car insurance or a coupon for 20¢ off a box of Tampax. Sure, childish maybe but I have to wonder what nasty names the guys in the mailroom call me when they open them.
Set the box at 47", one inch below the max...
Be aware that the direct mail industry got the regulations changed over 15 years ago to stop most of the liability for those stunts. The return postage limit is capped at something like a dollar. The regs let the post office simply toss overstuffed envelopes, something the sorting machines do with verve. If you want the BRM to actually cost the mail spammer anything then don't over-weight it. Actually, just sending back the empty envelope accomplishes about 85% of your goal of costing them something.
As of 15 years ago when I was in the magazine business, a postage-paid business reply matter (BRM) cost around 85 cents in postage so stuffing it doesn't do much. Takes the fun out of sticking a PP-BRM to an old tire and mailing it back :-)
Much of the BRM envelope processing is now done in the Third World. Again, 15 years ago Bangladesh was becoming a major player. Back then they'd ship the bulk mail to Bangladesh for opening and ship it again, this time to a nominally English speaking area like India for keypunch. Handwriting recognition software probably does it now. No Americans ever touch the paper after it leaves the USPS sorting facility.
Only speculation now: Probably the most effective thing at gumming up the works that you could do would be to put something in or on the envelope that would muck up the operation of the sorting machines. Like that rubber snot that they bind in the business reply post cards in magazines. The post office tends to reflect all the costs of processing back onto the direct mail industry so I bet that if a lot of people do this, there would be a negative effect on direct mail.
If you just want to get rid of junk mail then there are several steps you can take. I've done all of these and it has worked grandly.
Here is the DMA's opt-out page
Incidentally, the DMA is raising the legislative alarm regarding states that are proposing to pass do-not-mail legislation similar to the do-not-call ones. Their "bad" (our good) states are listed here.
John
-- John De Armond See my website for my current email address
I certainly would like to hear the mail officer's reply. If I could only see the faces:)
I might just cut and ship a cereal box!
I would in such case weight up the envelope to about 1/4 pound or
3.9 ounces or 3.6 ounces (with a few appropriately-sized pieces of sheet metal, but with envelope thickness under 1/4 inch). Preferably have the pieces of sheet metal thin in thickness (use more of them) for the envelope with such sheet metal to be "adequately machine-processable".- Don Klipstein (don@misty,com)
But, with the high cost of metals these days, what you send them might start to get worth more than the cost of postage...
-cj
Here, in this part of Canada, anyway, we were able to put ourselves on a 'Non addressed mail list'. This doesn't take care of those business who at some point inthe past have done business with you or have you on their ctalogue list! But reduces the 'spam' consisting of advertisng ec. somewhat!
Typical. Government/business makes sure EVERYBODY becomes a victim of crime.
I think childish is for them to send you mail for five years with no response. Or to call you repeatedly at dinner time.
Steve
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