Archive for 2008

We live in a fairly new neighborhood with all the amenities we could want. We have a water park, lots of trails to walk, play grounds, a spray park, good schools, and freaking paper hanging doorbell ringing sales folk. More than once in the last couple of weeks, Illi was down for less than 15 minutes when the doorbell rings, Mydrinn goes crazy, and it is just some moron selling something stupid with the same pitch everyone else uses. “I was just over at __________ (some generic name)’s house, and she loved this and bought a ton. But first, let me bore you about my company and other crap you don’t care about.” I mean really, we don’t give a rat’s who bought what, assuming the rather dubious assertion is even true. They never take no for an answer, and just keep talking (I assume) after the door is closed.

So, we researched the laws of Fort Worth, and found out that putting up a “No Soliciting” sign means that anyone that puts anything on our door, or petitions us for any reason can incur a $500 dollar, per incident fine. The only people exempt are government officials. We looked around online for something tasteful (and affordable), couldn’t find one (this one came up on our search many times – yuck), so we just put up a paper sign in the window with the following:

No Soliciting
Violation of this notice may result in a $500 per incident fine.
City of Fort Worth (Ord. No. 15245, § 1, 9-17-02) & (Ord. No. 17829, § 1, 10-9-07)
This includes Handbills and Religious Petitioning

Hopefully that will get the point across. If not, I will just start turning everyone into to the City for code violations. We like our sleep around here, and our “guard dog” Mydrinn will not be deterred from his solemn duty, so do us all a favor, just go away, we aren’t buying anything from you anyways.

There were several good stories around on the net about this topic, but one of my favorites was this girl’s. Her blog name and motto are just so good, I had to link back.