So by yesterday we still hadn't received any mail...since Monday. I'm sure there are still some statistics people out there going, "Well, it is possible that you won't get any mail for three days, especially if you have been waging a hate mail campaign on several of the more rabidly active suppliers of junk mail," but even mr rampy cracked last night and admitted that something must be wrong.

So we put our little heads together and came up with a theory that our recently moved-out upstairs neighbors had left us a little goodbye gift--specifically, a change of address form in our name.

The timing seemed to almost fit: they move out, and days later...no mail.

Plus we had been waging war on them for two years for being inconsiderate, loud-walking, clucks. Complicating matters is the fact that one of their other archenemies scaled the wall into their balcony one night and slashed up their patio chairs. Which is pretty scary, especially considering the fact that said archenemy would have had to climb by our bedroom window to reach their balcony. They never even hinted that they thought we might have had anything to do with it (and of course we didn't; all that climbing and slashing would have = work), but there was still an unpleasant feeling in the back of my mind that they might have thought we did.

So, this morning, our working theory was that either mistakenly (through their drugged out, drunken, techno-blaring shot brains' inability to write correctly) or on purpose (for vengeance), they had arranged with the post office to send all of our mail to a dumpster.

But mr rampy called the post office, and it turns out that the true story is that the mailman's key to the foyer stopped working, so rather than contacting someone, he just strolled back to his truck and went on his merry way. For three days. And counting.

Meanwhile I assume our building's mail began to pile up at the post office, where disgruntled postal workers could gather a little cheer to themselves by constructing forts with it, or at least a charming paper hat or two.

So two things boggle me about this:

• Our postman apparently had no intention, ever, of letting anyone know that it had become impossible to deliver mail to our building. His dependability and job loyalty is apparently right up there with those teenage stoners who join sales corps, get ferried and dropped off in random neighborhoods in vans, go smoke out in a field, and then pretend to their bosses that they have spent the whole day hitting the pavement to try to sell bored housewives sets of 1962 encyclopedias.

• No one else in our building seems to have noticed the lack of mail or taken the step of alerting the post office to a problem.

My conclusion being that we are surrounded by idiots who may set the building accidentally on fire at any moment because they are just that inept at the ins and outs of daily life, and that we have no means of sending for help, because there is no mail going out, and the phone line is jammed with incoming calls from solictors who have decided that it is cheaper to ahoy-ahoy me than to deluge me with more junk mail. Which I won't get anyway.

Bastardoes.