I just found out that last week was National Dog Bite Awareness Week. It was from June 6-10 but we didn’t get a notice about it until a few days ago. This is the first time we were made aware of this.
It turns out that letter carriers can stop delivering to a house or an entire neighborhood if he or she is a victim of a dog attack. They can also sue.
Some letter carriers will mark mailboxes with a special sticker that looks like a dog’s paw if there’s a dog on the property.
I wondered if cluster mailboxes (like you see in a lot of HOA neighborhoods) are safer by cutting down on dog attacks. My internet search revealed no information about that, but I did see that armed thieves stealing from cluster mailboxes can assault and rob letter carriers. So, I guess there should also be a National Criminal Awareness Week for letter carriers and postal customers.
Sena and I grew up in an era when most letter carriers walked their delivery routes. That’s less common nowadays, but some still do it. I used to deliver newspapers when I was a kid. I was pretty scared of most dogs on my route. I never got bit, but a few of them acted like they would as they charged full tilt at me. I also had to deliver to a guy who for some reason liked to grow flowers which attracted the biggest yellow jacket bees from hell. They were all around his front door.
What if we all just paid a fee and picked up our mail at the post office? We might not get the wrong mail as often because you could just drop it front of a postal employee and say on the way out, “Here you go, you put this in the wrong box–again.” Wouldn’t that feel good? I bet you’d get some other person’s mail a lot less often. On the other hand, postal employees might go on strike because of the extra work.
And then we’d get a lot less junk mail.
Go Retire Psychiatrist 