Our neighbor emailed us that there has been a rash of car break-ins and mail theft in our neighborhood. She said the police believe they have the kids that were responsible. Mail theft is kind of a big deal. The kids probably didn’t even know how serious an offense it is.
It reminded me of a story I did for the Refrigerator in 1999 when the Post Office was defacing their own mailboxes. They had come up with a new logo, one that looked completely wrong in context, and they were in the process of pasting the new, slightly bigger, logo on top of every perfectly fine old logo on every mailbox in the country. At that time there were still a few of the old logos left on overlooked mailboxes and we encouraged readers to send in their old mailbox sitings.
I wondered what the penalty would be if you got caught defacing every classic, tank-like mailbox in the country the new, hideous, speedy-like-FedEx, italicized logo. Here we are thirteen years down the road. The mailboxes still look like 49′ Fords. They aren’t going anywhere, they’re fixtures of stability in our neighborhood and the “new” logo makes them look like they’re falling over.
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