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Mail madness

Catherine Couretas

I was a resident of MacCracken Hall during my sophomore year. I loved everything about it - the location, the huge rooms and having a market attached to the building. There was one thing, however, of which I was not a huge fan - getting my mail.

The mailboxes were conveniently located in the lobby, but getting my mail and sending it was a completely different story.

The mailbox combinations were letters, rather than numbers, and if you didn't turn them to the exact location (literally down to the millimeter) they wouldn't open. The mail was sorted ... but not every day like it was supposed to be, and sending mail from the location in the residence hall was completely unreliable.

I remember being really excited to send a few Christmas cards to kids I babysit for back home with Miami University stickers inside. I told their mom that cards would be coming in the mail, and I dropped them off in the outgoing US (non-campus) mailbox in the lobby of MacCracken.

Did the letters ever reach their final destination? No.

Every time I had sent mail previously, I used the freestanding mailbox outside of Shriver and it was 100 percent reliable. The one time I decide to send something from the residence hall, avoiding the walk to Shriver in the cold, the letters never even made it.

What I do not understand about the Miami mail system is how spread out and disorganized it seems to be. The mail in residence halls would always arrive much later than expected (as my mom would warn me she sent cards, and I wouldn't receive them until two weeks later). I'm not sure who was responsible for getting the mail to the residence halls and who sorted it that year, but I can say I never saw a worker dealing with mail in any residence hall where I lived.

I'm upset I had to learn the hard way that sending mail from my residence hall was not reliable. That shouldn't be the case.

What happens when I have important documents I have to send home? Do I have to walk to Shriver or uptown to put my mail in an official United States Postal Service mailbox? The mail centers in residence halls have an outgoing mail slot, and that mail needs to get to its final destination.

This year, I opted to stay on campus and live in Heritage Commons. I liked the idea of living in an apartment rather than a house and felt like it would be a good transition to living on my own. The downside: still having to trek to the package center in Wells Hall.

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During my first two years at Miami, I didn't receive many packages, so I didn't think it was that big of a deal. Now, I can see the hassle created by having one giant package pick-up center for all on-campus students.

Wells Hall is not far from Heritage Commons, but with the sophomore living requirement there are plenty of students lining up out the door every day to pick up books, care packages and everything else sent to them. I do understand at the beginning of the year a lot of people are having books for class shipped to them, but I see more people leaving with packages from Nordstrom, American Eagle and Target than I see from Borders and Amazon.com.

In theory, the idea of a central package pick-up center is good. Everything is in one place and there is less of a chance of something being lost on the way to a residence hall. On the other hand, I don't have half an hour to wait in line (yes, I've had to wait that long at one point this year) for some essentials that I accidentally left at home or the birthday gift my mom sent.

The fact that there are usually only two, maybe three, people working there at a time does not help the situation either.

If I lived in Hepburn or Brandon and had a heavy class schedule I'm not sure if I would even have time to pick up a package I received. I'm lucky to have lived close enough to Wells (Emerson, MacCracken and now Heritage Commons) that distance has never been a problem for me, but I can only imagine how it affects students living farther away on campus.

I do think there is a more efficient way for the university to improve the mail system, spending little money, too. I think that the university should divide and conquer. There doesn't need to be a package center in every residence hall but one on each quad. Students would not have to travel as far and therefore would have more time to devote to schoolwork and other activities they participate in.

There are already students hired in each residence hall to help out with mail, so why not have them help with packages too?

Having a reliable university mail system is crucial, especially when students are from thousands of miles away and rely on that type of communication even some of the time. If Miami provided more, better options for students to send and receive mail and packages, the system would run much more smoothly and students would not have to trek across campus and wait for half an hour to get what they need.