Why You Might Randomly Find a Dryer Sheet in Your Mailbox? Letter Carrier Explains
Summertime arrives bringing a bounty of sunshine, ebullience, colorful flora, and jugs of freshly squeezed lemonade. But apart from all these niceties, they also bring along those lesser-friendly bug creatures. Especially, wasps tend to swarm inside our metal mailboxes and set up nasty colonies. Often resembling an umbrella, their colony is an inhospitable place, especially for the mailman who has to regularly slip his hand inside the mailbox. In April 2021, a letter carrier, Chris Strickley (u/istrx13), took to Reddit to share this dilemma and reveal that these “Satanic creatures” are the main reason why many postmen put dryer sheets in mailboxes.
For the past couple of years, Strickley found himself tormented by wasps and Yellowjackets that he calls “dastardly devils,” during the summer. These tiny vicious creatures travel in mobs, clapping and flinging their wings, and once they find the cool shelter of a rusty mailbox, they set up their nest inside. As a result, delivering letters becomes an uncanny experience for the letterman who opens the mailbox only to find a society of wasps casually chilling out inside, probably grinning at the postman as if saying how powerless he is in front of their display of power. “I can’t tell you how many times, especially during this part of the year, where I’ve opened up a box to see a little nest with 3-5 Yellowjackets just chilling,” he wrote in the post.
He added that sometimes if he’s very unlucky, he will find that the notorious wasps would have made their nest at the very back of the box. So when he would stick his hand inside, they would sting his flesh. “Last year alone I was stung 10 times on 10 separate occasions,” Strickley grumbled. Coming to the solution of the dilemma, he explained that these little creatures hate dryer sheets, and resist their scent. That’s the trick to shoo them away. “We’ve found that they hate scented dryer sheets. If we encounter a box that is a problem for nests, we’ll often put one in there and it does the trick.”
Continuing the post, he urged people to not remove the dryer sheets if they see these in their mailbox. “If you randomly see a dryer sheet in the back of your mailbox, your mail carrier put it there for a reason,” he wrote in the post caption, adding, “It could save your carrier from being stung.” As his post became viral and TODAY caught up with him, Strickley revealed that he first came up with the idea of adding a dryer sheet to a mailbox during his first year on the job. He noticed his supervisor had a box of dryer sheets on their desk and other carriers took handfuls out. That's when he learned the hack and has been continuing it every spring and summer since.
The letter carrier added that the brand is irrelevant as long as the sheet is scented. He also said that this “preventive measure” might not always work for nests that are too big. Some Redditors recommended that Strickley leave notes to inform people about wasps invading their mailboxes. Others had quippy comments about the dire wasp situation. “Those little b******s cannot be reasoned with. I tried explaining to a wasp in my mailbox that it was an inappropriate choice for a nest, and the response I got was quite hostile. I had to go nuclear with that foamy stuff,” said u/proud-entertainment. Furthermore, concluding Strickley’s message, u/sonofabutch made a humorous declaration, “If there is a dryer sheet in your mailbox, that means a gang has marked your house for a home invasion!”