(*$&%)(*%$!!!

I am NOT in a good mood this morning.

Oh, I recognize that what I'm going to talk about is a minor annoyance in the Grand Scheme of Things, but it's still an annoyance:

Late last night, some a-hole (or, more likely, a-holes) vandalized the mailboxes on my street. Went through and pulled off the flags (they didn't get the flag off of mine, but it's bent and the mechanism's damaged) and grabbed the doors and pulled them down and back so they're all bent and won't close.

(I was able - by using a pliers - to bend mine back so it will at least stay closed for when my mail's delivered today).

But I will need to buy a new mailbox, as will all my neighbors. (Since my mailbox is just barely functional, I'm going to wait a few days - I'm sure there's nothing the vandals would love more than to find a nice brand-spanking-new box to destroy.)

This kind of thing enrages me beyond what it really should. It feels kind of like a violation to me. And it's also so pointless - if someone stole money from me, I could almost kinda-sorta justify it to myself, saying, "Well, maybe they had no job, and their welfare had run out, and they had a kid that's hungry." Or if I had something nice that was stolen, I'd be angry and sad, but also feel like, well, at least someone may be enjoying it.

But busting up people's mailboxes? Why? I mean - yeah, I know, it's a shortlived thrill and possibly if you're drunk/high/bored it seems like a good way to spend the time.

But what pisses me off about vandalism is the collateral damage that's created. All of us on my street are going to have to go buy new mailboxes - assume 1/2 hour time to drive to the Lowe's, pick one out, pay, drive back. And then at least 1/2 hour to install the thing. That's one person-hour per household WASTED. Time we could have spent - I don't know, spent writing poetry or mowing our lawns or playing with our kids or something.

And then there's the cost.

This is the third mailbox I've bought since I've lived in my house. (And I've lived here just over five years). The first one, someone hit with their car. That could have been an accident but if the person were really kind and upstanding, they'd've left contact info and offered to buy me a new mailbox. The second one, I had when I had really bad neighbors renting next door to me. Neighbors I called the cops on once or twice because of their activities. I can't prove it's them, but SOMEONE, while I was out of town, tried to blow my mailbox up with firecrackers (it was all burned inside). It was still functional after I cleaned it out, though, so I kept it, until someone chunked a pumpkin at it the day after Hallowe'en a couple years ago.

And now this. So I've spent perhaps $60 on mailboxes in five years.

I'd get a P.O. Box and just be done with home delivery, except the effort, time, and irritation (the post office here is on the corner of a very busy street and it's an awkward turn into it no matter what direction you're coming from, and it's also the opposite direction from how I either go to work or go home at the end of the day) of that would be greater than periodically replacing mailboxes.

It just irritates me, though - thinking about the person who did that, how they had that free time (it seems like it's always the people who have little time on their hands to deal with this kind of crap who get vandalized) and thought "Hey, let's go destroy someone else's property!"

I wonder, sometimes, if vandalism is some kind of political statement - like, "We don't have nice stuff and we don't think anyone else should." I have a friend whose husband coaches Little League, and they have to be very careful how and where equipment is stored - a lot of times it gets vandalized, and one time when vandals were caught, they were kids from, shall we say, the wrong side of the tracks, and their opinion was very much one that it was OK for them to destroy stuff, because the people who owned it were "rich," and they could "always buy more."

So I don't know.

The other thing I don't know is: should I bother to report this? Is it worth it? I mean, the local police don't exactly put an effort into trying to deter vandalism or deal with it when it happens. And my few customer-service type dealings with the local post office suggest to me that they'd just laugh at me if I called them up and reported it.

If I knew someone who did them, I'd hire someone to build one of those brick surrounds for a mailbox and put my mailbox in that; let the little craps try and damage it then.