Apr 24, 2008

A new kind of SPAM

When I was a kid, "Spam" was that funny almost-lunchmeat stuff my Mom used to fry up to go with macaroni and cheese. I believe it originated as meat rations for soldiers overseas in World War II, and started production for the general consumer at the end of the war. For the past five to ten years, "Spam" is the name for all that junk email you get in your email that you didn't ask for, don't want, and have no way of stopping. As fast as you can filter it out with your email program, the spammers are coming up with new and different ways to attack you with their email litter. But now there's a NEW kind of Spam. It's a Spam I've not heard anyone ever mention before. It's MAILBOX SPAM and it's driving me crazy. Mailbox Spam is the papers, flyers, advertisements and letters people leave on, under and around your physical outdoor mailbox. It is the same as SPAM in your email -- you don't ask for it, the people leaving it there don't care if you want it or not, and it's for items you'd never buy -- except it has an actual physical and environmental presence... We live at the bottom of a hill with 20 other houses lining the street going up the hill from us. Not only do we live at the bottom of the hill, but we also live on the east side of the road and in the middle of a cul-de-sac. So what happens when all this MAILBOX SPAM is stuck on mailboxes, dropped in driveways or thrown on front steps? On a windy day, a good percentage of it is blown down the road and into our yard. There is one particular store, inadequately named THE DOOR STORE since they never even consider coming close to my front door, who delivers sale flyers in little plastic bags. I can't even begin to count how many of these sale flyers I've picked up out of my yard, or how many of these plastic bags I found stuck to the wire fence behind our yard. I have called them three times now to complain, but it makes no difference. Just like email spam, it does no good to request they stop delivering it! I also get Mailbox Spam for Avon, gutters, new windows, new siding, lawncare, tree cutting, babysitting, yard sales, and people asking for donations -- tossed in my driveway, stuck to my mail box, hung on my mailbox flag, thrown in the puddle at the end of the driveway. All unrequested, unsolicited, unwanted. First, I don't understand why these people don't have to buy a stamp like the rest of us. They want to use my mailbox to deliver their advertisements to me -- buy a stamp and maybe keep the cost of stamps down for awhile. But throw unwanted, unsolicited, unneeded paper in my driveway? I call that littering plain and simple. Where are the environmentalists on this one?? Plastic bags blown around, trees chopped down to put out these flyers and advertisements that are forced on people and only add to both the landfill and litter problem.... Now there's a bandwagon someone should jump on!

5 comments:

The Calico Quilter said...

We get a stupid, 90% advertising/ 10% celebrity gossip "newspaper" dumped in our driveway every Wednesday called the "Star". Who reads this thing I have no idea. It's one more thing to pick up out of the street and dispose of. If it rains, the sodden papers wash down the hill (guess who's at the bottom of the hill? Moi.) Everyone in town gripes about it (our talk radio station had a sort of campaign against the company) but they still appear. The waste of it!

This irritation is in addition to the pounds of junk I pick up out of my side yard (I live on a corner) from people flinging their trash out of their car window.

scrappysue said...

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Anonymous said...

We don't get that kind of "Spam" in our area. We get lots of junk newspaper/flyer kinds of things in our actual mailbox though. At least those people pay some postage. There is a law saying that ONLY mail from the post office can be put in mailboxes, so if that's what they're doing they can be prosecuted. I just usually walk directly from our mailbox to the dumpster. Yep, what a waste.

Anonymous said...

Maybe the post office could do something? How annoying!

The Calico Quilter said...

I had a thought: Maybe we should hang our blue recycling bin on the mailbox pole - saves walking into the house to dispose of all this useless paper!