Embarrassing Suburban Confessions #1

I have forgotten how to use a mailbox.


Yes. I know. You can stop laughing now. Please.

Bit of background here. I'm currently house-sitting for my friends S&R. They just bought a nice, new house pretty close to where I grew up in Maryland, and they asked me to house-sit while they went on a much-needed vacation. One of my house-sitting duties (okay, my main house-sitting duty is basically to turn the lights on and off at intervals to keep the house from looking deserted) is to get the mail, sift through it, and send back the stuff that was mailed to the previous inhabitants. Easy, right? Sure. If you can use a mailbox. Which I apparently can't do.

So, today I went to get the mail. Brought in a huge stack of it too, ans started sorting. At the bottom were all the things I had tried to send back. What was this? Was the postman on strike? Did he figure that this mail had the correct address (even if the name was wrong) and so it was no longer his problem? There must be some way of notifying him that this mail needed to be taken away. I mean, how would he know which stack of mail was in the mailbox because it needed to be taken away and posted and which stack was left there by a lazy house-sitter who just hadn't picked it up the day before (ahem). So, how to notify the postman?

It did eventually come back to me. There is a flag on the postbox. It just took me a bit of head scratching... But when I think about it, when is the last time I lived in a house? Hmmmm? (Commence finger counting.) Almost nine years ago. Yeah, it has been nine years since I've used a suburban mailbox.

Wow.