Why Can’t We Just Act Civilized Amarillo?
The longer I live in Amarillo, the more disenchanted I grow with wanting to help people here.
I know that sounds terrible, and I don't want you to take it out of context. I really do seem to like Amarillo, but I'm starting to reach my wits end with something.
By nature, my wife and I are helpers. We try to do as many good things as we can for people, especially when they're in need. Pay it forward kind of people you know?
Well when we moved here, we were obviously in need of some boxes to pack up our house in Austin. We took to Facebook and community pages there to ask if anyone had moving boxes we could have. Thanks to those pages, we were able to get all the boxes we needed without having to pay for one.
Fast forward to unpacking our house, now we've got all these boxes that we no longer need. So what do we do? That's right, post them on Facebook for those who may need them.
Well we've officially been taken advantage of by someone who decided to grab just more than boxes...and it seems to be a problem that runs throughout the entire city.
We had a person who had been in need of boxes, so they reached out and we got them all hooked up. They mentioned any other boxes we ended up with, they'd take them. See, they seem to be good people because they like to help others in need, and that's what they need the boxes for. However, they have officially gone a bit too far.
Over Labor Day weekend, we had quite a few boxes stacked up on our enclosed porch in the front of our house. We let them know there were more for them to grab, and they said they'd pick them up over the weekend. We were out of town for my sons baseball tournament that weekend, but didn't have a problem with them grabbing them while we were gone.
When we got home, we noticed all the boxes were gone...along with several other items from our porch. Our entire porch got cleaned out, all the way down to OUR MAIL!!
First off, who takes someone's mail? That is an actual federal offense. They also grabbed a couple more items that were near the boxes. When we reached out to them, they admitted to grabbing everything there believing they were "donations" for their cause. Again, love that you are trying to do good in the community, but nowhere did we mention anything about the other stuff on the porch...just the boxes.
They went on to say that the mail they thought was "old mail", trash from the move. However, none of this mail was near the boxes we said they could have and it all had our current address on it. That doesn't exactly scream old mail. We're working on getting all our stuff back from this person as they seem to be wanting to cooperate, but come on. Just take what we said you could have, not anything else!
This also isn't the first time someone has helped themselves to something at our house. I was cutting the grass one day and my mower ran out of gas. I go into our shed only to find that my gas can and 2 in 1 oil for my trimmer had magically gone missing. I just had both of those things 2 weeks prior. I know because I used them!
Why is stealing and helping yourself to others stuff such a thing here? I've seen it and heard about it from so many people. It seems to be a rampant problem, and I don't know how to stop it. Any ideas?