I Never Found Out Who Did It
This happened about 20 years ago, but it still makes me giggle a bit. We had just purchased a house out in the countryside. The nearest neighbors were 300+ feet away, quiet, clean air, etc. I loved this place.
I went down to the local hardware store, bought myself a post and a mailbox then set about getting it installed. There are regulations about where a mailbox must be installed with respect to the hard surface of the road.
There are also some guidelines for how the post should be installed as a safety measure for motorists. Note that mailbox PLACEMENT is a requirement, but installation is guidelines. This is important later.
My new mailbox was up for no more than two days. Then disaster struck. Someone came along and hit it with a baseball bat. The side of the box was caved in and my mail was all over the ditch.
I figured it was kids being kids and I’d just replace the box and that would be the end of it. Nope. The new mailbox was up for almost a week before someone homered it. The box was almost 100 feet away from the post and the post had been pushed over. Fine. I’ll just build a stronger post.
This time, instead of a 6-foot 4×4 post sunk 2 feet in the ground, it was an 8 foot post sunk 4 feet in the ground and set in 2 feet of concrete. About a week goes by and my mailbox has been hit again and the post broken off. I didn’t know who was doing it, but I intended to get revenge.
I dug my concrete out of the hole and prepared my nuclear option. I rented a PO Box and forwarded all of my mail there. Using the same 4-foot deep hole, I cut an 8-foot length of 6-inch well casing (large-diameter thick-walled steel pipe used for water wells).
I set my well casing in the hold and filled the hole completely with concrete. Then I filled the pipe with concrete (all 8 feet of it) with concrete.
I welded on a crossbar (2-inch square tube) to extend the mailbox to the required position relative to the road surface and mounted the cheapest plastic mailbox I could find on it. Then I really ensured my point was made. I then got a bread bag and filled it with some old-school red barn paint that I had.
That stuff doesn’t come off. I tied the bag up really tightly and put it in the mailbox. Sure enough, a couple of days later I happened to be at home when I heard a relatively loud engine coming down the road towards my house.
There was an EXTREMELY loud metallic “CLANG!”, and then some screaming, and, finally, the engine noises proceeding down the road and out of earshot. I went to look and found that, as expected, my mailbox had been demolished.
There was a large splatter of red paint on the ground. When I looked at the post more closely, I noticed a shallow dent on one side as though the steel had been struck hard by something metal.
Perhaps an aluminum baseball bat? I never did find out who it was, but I did spot a black Toyota pickup truck several weeks later that had a bunch of red paint down the passenger side. I wonder how that got there?