You’ve got mail (maybe)
I live in a compound where, since January, it’s been possible to have mail delivered to your door. Stop sniggering at the back – it’s a big thing here. Up until then, doorstop postal delivery simply hasn’t existed in the UAE.
Mail? Or no mail? Your guess is as good as mine
Instead, we all have Post Office Boxes – while that might not sound like a trauma, consider that, at one point, ours was so far from home we were driving a 75km round trip just to pick up the electricity bill.
So when Emirates Post announced this wonderful new breakthrough of door-to-door postal delivery I signed up. And it’s been great. We now have a post box stuck to the side of our house and it has a little red/green indicator to show if there’s any mail.
Only I think they forgot to teach the postmen what red and green mean.
I imagined that red might be “you’ve got mail” and green might mean “empty”. But sometimes I have a look inside when it’s on green and there’s a letter going crispy in the heat. So I slide the indicator to red to show I’ve got the post. The postman then slides it to green but when I next look, there’s nothing there.
So it’s taken me four months of experimenting to figure out what the colours mean, and it’s far more basic than “mail” and “no mail”: A change of colour simply means the postman’s been. He’s just making sure that I know he’s doing his job by visiting my house three times a week and it’s absolutely not his fault I’m a Molly-no-mail. Doh.
