Just got a call from Housemate James with some routine stuff, including following up on his question yesterday of why there hadn’t been any post for him. Apparently he’s ordered about 18 things, and was expecting them over the weekend. The worst-case scenario is of course to get one of the red “while you were out” cards, which then means you’ve got to wait 48 hours, then go to the fairly awkwardly located parcel depot to collect. James has had an ongoing suspicion that the postman has been just filling the cards out and then popping them through the door, and not knocking at all.
He reported that today he swung the front door open to go out, and standing there on the mat looking startled was our postman, part-way through filling out a red card.
James glared at him (or at least carried out as close to a glare as he’s capable of) and challenged him with, “I didn’t hear you knock?”.
The postman replied timidly, “Ah. I may have gotten ahead of myself in this case”.
Good work James – hunch demonstrably proven.
I asked him if he’d given the postman a verbal dressing-down about this, and James said that he didn’t want to give him too much of a hard time, because the guy seemed a bit on the shy side. There’s a song in that somewhere I think – the postman who wouldn’t knock, because he found it difficult talking to strangers.