March 17- 2010- Meet me out front

I recently had a delivery of a DVD I’d been promising myself for some time, but it would still be mouldering away, unwatched and unloved had it not been for the tracking number and a thorough search.
The delivery person walked right past my front door, the clean-swept one with the light blazing away above the mail slot, past the mailbox, and 30 feet down my snowy, muddy driveway to leave my package between a rusty nasty screen door and the inside solid wood number, with no knob, peeling paint and so many cobwebs, there could have been no doubt it was never used. Which it isn’t.

Three days I’d been waiting for the BBC adaptation of P&P (the one with Colin Firth!) to arrive (huge sale at Amazon). Three days I’d come home with the hope of seeing the package inside my cosy front porch, perhaps sitting on the freshly-washed stoop of my front door, the one with no peeling paint and the welcome mat (it says welcome and everything!) And, for the next few days, a quilted shamrock decoration will hang there in honour of the season. Alas, Mr Darcy and I were not to be together until Sunday morning, when I wondered whether the package had perhaps been tied up in customs and I checked the tracking.

I was stunned to discover it had been delivered. Equally stunned to find no trace of it in the porch, the mailbox, the bushes or the back yard. The dog had not eaten it, it was not under my car. Even more confused, I thought, “Is it possible? The side back door?” And there it was, wedged in the snowy filth of an unused entrance we haven’t yet gotten around to blocking out with plywood.

Seriously, what’s the deal with back doors? Further, what’s the reticence about front doors? I’ve had people walk past my brightly-lit porch to the side door and knock for some time, getting no response because the unused, unlit, unwelcoming entrance is at the end of a hall at the bottom of some stairs, behind a closet and a bunch of other storage. But there they stand, knocking and wondering why we aren’t answering.

I get that I’m in the minority here, but I simply don’t understand.
If you don’t use your front door, could you please tell me why not? I’m worried I’m missing out on some part the zeitgeist, and I just hate it when that happens.