Senior Samantha Mandel puts in her earbuds, blasts Frank Ocean’s alternative R&B music, and picks up a pile of letters — Hillsdale College’s mail doesn’t sort itself.
“I just blast him in my AirPods, and it’s the most calming thing ever because it gives me a little brain break from school work,” Mandel said. “I know I’m being productive, even though I’m sitting down and just sorting the mail. It’s therapeutic in that way.”
Every mail room employee has one goal: ensure the campus receives its letters as quickly as possible. The mail room on the lower level of the student union operates separately from the package center in the Fowler Maintenance Building. They do, however, face many challenges when ensuring mail gets where it needs to go, according to the student director of the student union and senior Katherine Vander Wall.
“If the address is just that poorly written, we can’t make any sense of it,” Vander Wall said. “It has to go to return to sender. We can’t do anything about it. Probably 30% has to be returned to the sender.”
Illegible writing on letters isn’t the only problem. Sophomore Isaiah Joiner said the mail room has to deal with wrong addresses and small packages not meant for the mail room.
“The Hillsdale mail service frequently gives us the wrong letters, so we have a really big return to sender bucket with tons of stuff in it,” Joiner said. “We get a lot of mail here that is not for Hillsdale College’s properties. It’s different addresses on Hillsdale Street or Union Street.”
Despite the obstacles, Vander Wall said the mail room gets mail out to students with incredible speed and precision.
“We don’t lose stuff. We’ve got a system. People will be like, ‘Oh, can I just look around in the bins?’ No, you may not. That’s not how this works,” Vander Wall said. “We don’t lose stuff. We’ve never been like, ‘Oh, I just found this letter behind the table.’ It just does not happen. People do not need to worry about their mail getting lost in the union. It, more often than not, gets lost in the world somewhere along the way on the mail route.”
Each shift begins with an assessment of what tasks require immediate attention so the more important mail and old mail gets where it needs to go faster, according to Mandel.
“We have a pile of mail that we have to organize each shift, and then after organizing it, we have to put it into the mailboxes,” Mandel said. “Depending on which one looks more full, we do that task first. We prioritize that. It’s up to our own discernment on which task to do first each time.”
While their system typically runs smoothly, Vander Wall said there are always delays at the beginning of each semester as they try to handle the waves of mail that arrived when no one was working.
“I’ll try to work some extra shifts to get that covered, or I’ve got a couple of people who are really great about picking up those extra shifts,” Vander Wall said. “We try to get that under control pretty quickly and we’ll also try to organize it by priority.”
Students can help alleviate the backlog of mail at the beginning of the fall semester by picking up their mail left from the previous semester, according to Vander Wall.
“At the end of summer break, before the new school year, we have to clear all the mailboxes. Any mail that’s left in the little mailboxes in the hallway at the end of the summer has to be put back in a bin,” Vander Wall said. “We then have to take the mail out of that box and re-sort it into their new address because the addresses change every year.”
Vander Wall said she understands the frustration of not receiving an expected letter and the students in the mail room are willing to ensure every letter reaches its proper destination in a timely manner.
“It shouldn’t be more than a few days in general and if someone is looking for a specific piece of mail,” Vander Wall said. “Maybe they know they’re getting a birthday card from their mom, they know they’re getting their driver’s license sent by their parents, or they know they’re getting something important. They can stop by and give us their name and email address, and we’ll email them as soon as it comes in.”
