Do you still use the doorbell?

Increasingly, I’m noticing that people coming to the house, seeking my attention, ignore the doorbell (which is just to the right of the door) in favor of knocking on the door. Mind you, that’s the outer door. There’s also a thick, insulated inner door. The only reason I knew there was someone knocking just now is that I opened the insulated door to see if the mail had been delivered yet, and saw something blue and billowy through the windows in the door (yes, you can look through the front door to see that it fronts on a vestibule which has a thicker door farther in). Had I not opened that door, the fellow holding that blue umbrella would have been knocking in vain. (It turns out he was canvassing for signatures on a petition, but wasn’t terribly clear about the purpose of the petition, so I declined to sign.)

Delivery folks, who see hundreds of doors every day, never can find that doorbell. It is not a rare occasion that I’ll be home all day, waiting for a delivery, only to open the door late in the day for some other reason, and discover the package sitting on the top step, delivered but unheralded.

And while I can sort of understand the neighbors not wanting to use the doorbell when signaling for our attention on the sabbath (we live in an orthodox Jewish neighborhood), the other six days a week, too, bring far more knocks than ding-dongs.

So what is it? Why is the doorbell getting no love? Is this something that happens in your neighborhood, too?