Redneck Revenge

If you live on a rural route, you know what a pain it can be
when people dump out junk they can't be bothered to dispose
of properly.

We have had an entire burned truck abandoned at the entrance
to our property, a dump-truck load of tree trimmings right across
the road so you couldn't drive in, an old refrigerator, and countless
puppies and kittens. More about the live stuff another time.

One Sunday morning I was headed to town to do the grocery
shopping, and saw a Wal-mart bag full of something on the gravel
road to our property association. We have 10 families that have
mailboxes on this end of the property. We try to keep it cleaned
up and looking nice. So I stopped the car and got out to pick up
the trash. Now it was already 80 degrees, and this bag had half a
20 oz. Mtn. Dew that was still cold. So somebody was in such
a hurry that they couldn't haul their trash home, they had to dump
it on our road. I looked through it, and found a cardboard-and-
plastic wrapper from a kid's toy package, an empty pack of
cigarettes, some losing scratch-off lottery tickets, an empty chip
bag, a little-chocolate-donut wrapper, AND a junk mail ad for
some kind of off-brand cigarettes WITH A NAME AND
ADDRESS.

I threw the junk in the car, and after shopping, I smuggled it
into the house and down to my office. I didn't tell anybody about
this until now, because it really is kind of psycho.

I found an old Amazon.com box and printed a new address
label, along with a short note that we DO have a sign down by
the road that says we prosecute trespassers, so do not dump
anything else on our private property. Then I took the soda
and poured it out so I didn't have to pay to ship old soda,
and I packed all the junk in the box with the note on top and
sealed it up. I propped it under my desk until the next day when
I could get to the post office. Yes, I really did mail it. It was
two-dollars-and-change well spent.

Yes, it felt very wrong, but oh, so right. Because this address
was a couple towns away on a rural route. That meant the
mailman wouldn't just leave it on a porch--with a mailbox
out on the road, he would leave an orange card to pick
up the package at the post office. So this lucky litterer would
have to go to town and pick it up. Hmmm....did he work,
and have to make arrangements for someone else to get it? Did
he wait until he was out running errands with the family? Did he
send a wife/girlfriend to get it? If only I could have seen the face
of the person who opened up his own trash. What karma!