Mail call

As Constant Readers know, Pnin and I recently moved to Arlington. At our new house, we have a wall mount mailbox that looks sort of like this.

We noticed a day or two after moving in that the mailman wasn't picking up outgoing mail. It just sat out in the box. Pnin, vexed at this situation, had me call the Arlington post office early one morning. I explained the issue to our mailman's supervisor, who offered the following:

Mailman's Supervisor: Is there a flag attached to your mailbox?

Isabel: No. It's a wall mount.

Mailman's Supervisor: Well, if there's no flag attached, then there's no way for the mailman to know if there's any new mail for him to pick up. You gotta, you know, let him know there's mail there.

Isabel: I hate to sound snarky, but, like, he could look insidethe mailbox.

Mailman's Supervisor: Well, but they don't always do that. They put the mail in the mailbox and then they don't look to see if there's new mail to pick up.

Isabel: But surely we aren't the only people in America who have a wall mount mailbox. If wall mount mailboxes were really that outre, they, you know, wouldn't be sold at Home Depot.

Mailman's Supervisor: What does outre mean?

Isabel: Foreign. Exotic. Weird. I don't know. The point is... can you please tell your mailmen to look inside the wall mount mailbox when they come to our house?

Mailman's Supervisor: Well, I can, but my men won't always look. You should get a mailbox with a flag. Or you could get a flag for your mailbox.

Isabel: Maybe, but we'd really prefer not to go to the trouble if we can avoid it. And a flag on our existing mailbox would look silly.

So the next day, Pnin posted the following cautionary note to the mailbox:

Dear Postal Worker,

Please make sure to pick up the outgoing mail. Please do not just leave it there, as happened yesterday.

Thank you very much for your attention to this matter. I very much appreciate all of your help and your good work.

[Timofey Pavlovich Pnin
1234 Our Street
Arlington, VA, XXXYZ]

For a week, the note worked like a charm. Pnin took it down on Saturday and, lo and behold, the mailmen left behind the outgoing mail again today.

We are at our wits' end. Do we give in and shell out for a new mailbox -- of the stand-alone and be-flagged variety? As I indicated above, other people have wall mount mailboxes and do not have this problem. How? We could leave Pnin's note out again. But it doesn't seem to be much of a permanent solution. Although I found it sort of cute, he fears that others will not, and he does not want our guests to see it.