another thing that sucked about my life in gulfport, florida
One of the things that sucked about living at my cheap little apartment in Gulfport was that I shared a single mailbox with five or six other residents. Every time I checked the mailbox it would be crammed and overflowing with not only my mail, but the mail for most of my neighbors. The problem was compounded by the transient nature of the people who lived in the those apartments. A lot of tennants would just stay for a month or two before moving again. So this single mail box not only held the mail (and junk mail) of five or six different apartments, but it held the mail for all the past tennants who had drifted along, or run from the law, or ended up in the street or whatever.
This gave me a chance to see the kind of mail that my neighbors were getting. There were a lot of court notices and overdue bills and that kind of stuff. But mostly the box was filled with coupon fliers from Hungry Howie's and Subway.
At first I didn't really care that much about sharing my mailbox with so many derelicts and deadbeats, because most of the mail I got was from bill collectors too. I figured the overstuffed community mailbox would help to hide my identity and whereabouts. I would just let the threatening letters languish and die in a kind of postal garbage can.
But every now and then I would be expecting an important letter or check (like my $80 modeling bonanza from Dillards) and I would get really concerned about the mailbox situation. It was during one of these periods of concern that I brought up the situation to my landlord.
"How come you don't have an individual mail box for every tennant?" I asked him. "It seems like there should be a small row of boxes that say unit 1, unit 2, etc." I thought questioning him like this would force him to face this ridiculous and inadequate situation and fix it. But instead of taking any responsibility, my landlord just made up a ridiculous lie.
"Actually, the post office told us we couldn't use one of those multi-mailboxes," he said. "They positively ruled it out."
"Really? But I see them everywhere?" I said.
"I don't know. That's just what they said," my landlord said.
3:52:29 PM 
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