Get To Know The People In Your Neighborhood

This past weekend, I noticed something a little odd in my neighborhood. As I sat on my downstairs neighbor's balcony with him, smoking cigars, I watched an old man in a big white Lincoln town car park across the street from us and just sit in his car for about twenty minutes.
At first I thought he was waiting for someone or listening to music, but then he exited his car, walked to the end of the block, stopped, returned to his car and drove away. About five minutes later he returned around the corner from where he was parked, and sat for another five minutes. At this point I thought he was stalking someone, but eventually he again got out of his car again, and went into the building on the corner of the two streets where he had parked that evening.

Yesterday I watched him do the almost the same thing again.

I can understand that sometimes people with a lot of time may take on the extra exertion of moving their cars closer to their homes in order to be lazy later on, but in the instance of this man, he was no more than twenty-five feet closer to his apartment door on his second park than on his first. On yesterday's car re-park he was no closer the second time than the first. In both cases he was not in danger of getting a parking ticket if he remained where he was.

So some of my neighbors are curiousities, but nothing compares to the strangeness of a man I heard about in Philadelphia.

Someone I talked to recently from the Inspector General's office told me about an old man in Philly who was caught impersonating a postal carrier. It is, of course, a crime to steal mail, but this case was very odd. Apparently this man had been stopping at various businesses for over a decade, in full USPS gear, picked up the mail and delivered it... to a blue mailbox on the street. He never actually stole the mail, he just pretended to be a mailman and helped the mail get delivered in his own strange way.

He was never prosecuted for his actions, he was very old and had not stolen the mail, he just took it to a mailbox. The I.G. guy told the businesses to stop giving their mail to this man. They never found out why he was doing this. I guess he just always wanted to be a letter carrier.

I don't necessarily think that either of these people are dangerous, but at the same time, I think I'll avoid my neighbor and make sure my mailman always has the most current stamps. It's the best test I can think of.