Out Arizona Way

[ezdays]

This is one from 2006 that I updated a bit. I could add more records, but it's a bit wordy as it is.

Records

You can’t do much of anything now days without knowing that somewhere there is a record for whatever it is you’re doing. Most people relate records to greatness. The fastest runner, the most points scored in a ballgame, the highest number of gummy bears eaten in an hour; all things to be proud of. There are, however, records that are not ones of pride, or at least ones you wished hadn’t happened. Here in Arizona we have a few good and a few not so good records.

Let’s start with the one we hold for being the best place in the country to have your mail stolen. Mail is sacred you say, poppycock, and the thieves prove it day after day. They just love those boxes in apartment houses and those cluster boxes that the post office insists that developers put in all new neighborhoods. This way they don’t have to go door to door to lift your mail from the box in front of your house. They can just go and rip the front panel off and steal the mail from a dozen or so families all at once. Why they’ve even become so bold here that they’ve actually hijacked mail trucks on their routes. But here’s one that’s hard to beat. A few years ago all the thieves needed were a large wrench and a strong back to do their dirty work. At the Post Office where I go, they were able to take a drop box off its mounts and drive away with it, and then do likewise at another. They were stupid enough to try to cash a check they found in the mail and were captured a few days later. When caught, they said one mailbox was so full they had to call a friend to help them load it on their truck.

One record that goes hand in hand with this is we are #1 in identity theft. Yep. If you want to lose your identity, come on down, we’ve got professionals that are here to help you do just that. I don’t know why that is, but I think a lot of con artists like the mild winters we have here and need to finance their vacations the easy way.

We lead the nation in vehicle theft as well. Our proximity to the Mexican border doesn’t help. A few years ago after our pickup truck was taken from our driveway, the police told us that frequently a “chop shop” gets an order for specific parts. A rickety old truck limped up from Mexico and whizzed back bright and shiny with parts from our truck. A lot of these stolen vehicles get impounded across the border; there are literally thousands on vehicles in impound lots there, but they fail to notify the owners. They’ve documented cases where someone can look through the fence and see their vehicle, but the Mexican authorities will not acknowledge anything, so there they sit.

I can’t say if this is a record or not, but I think we have to be somewhere near the top when it comes to public funding for grandiose private professional sports complexes. We have one for basketball, another for hockey, a professional baseball field and lastly, a brand new $450,000,000 football edifice. They all have separate tax-funded “practice” facilities as well. I expect any day now the Peewee League is going to insist that if we don’t provide them with their own opulent facility to play in, that they are going to move elsewhere. I’m sorry, but I’m of the opinion that a sports team is a business, and any business that can afford to pay most of their workers yearly salaries in the seven and eight figures, should at least be able to afford a place to work.

Weather records make us proud, well some of them do. Southern Arizona is by far the sunniest place on earth. Yuma is in the Guinness Book of world records for having the highest percentage of sunny hours (91% of all daylight hours). Our high temperature record in Phoenix is 122 degrees. I was here that day and it just seemed like another hot summer day. Yuma hit 124 in 1995; glad I wasn’t there for that one. We've had record highs all this summer along with barely any rain. We are not the driest place on earth but sometimes it seems so. Our average yearly rainfall is less than 10 inches; so far this year we're only pushing 3.5".

I’ll leave it up to you to decide which records we should be proud of and which we’d rather not talk about.