LINDSEY BOERMA
Living Assistant
They call it snail mail— regular U. S. postal mail that requires the delivery of a physical letter or package. With the communication technology that is available to virtually anyone, college students are among the mass of people turning from this seemingly prehistoric means of relaying messages.
However, by taking a look behind the scenes into the responsibilities of those who work in mail services, students may begin to appreciate the benefits that can come from utilizing postal mail.
The process of Pepperdine’s mail service is among the numerous postal services in the United States that is overlooked by users. Stan Jones, manager of mail services at Pepperdine, explains this process that many students fail to acknowledge.
“Mail comes in from the Malibu Post Office, and it is then sorted by student, department or faculty,” Jones said. “Then it is brought to the student mailbox area. All this is done by our staff and about 20 student workers who we try to employ every year.”
One of these students, freshman Amanda Anselme, describes the procedure that occurs when the mail reaches the student mailboxes in the Sandbar.
“My responsibilities are to put mail in people’s mailboxes, give packages at the work window and to put the packages on the shelves,” Anselme said. “We have a special system so that they’re easier to find.”
These special systems are precisely what many users of this postal mail overlook with the desire to get their mail in a speedier manner.
Forrest Mead, a freshman international business major, expressed the problem that most students have with Pepperdine’s mail services.
“There is definitely a delay between the time the mail gets there and the time it gets sorted and put into the box,” Mead said. “I think it’s pretty well-run overall, but they could probably hire a couple more employees to get it sorted faster.”
Anselme responded to this common reaction among students by explaining the immediacy with which the employees act.
“A lot of people don’t understand that we work as fast as we can,” she said. “As soon as we get the packages, we put the slips in.”
Jones also said the sorting process is prolonged by the mail that arrives without a box number.
“Something that has really been becoming a problem is that more than 45 or 50 percent of all incoming packages don’t have the box numbers on them,” he said.
“If it doesn’t have a number, we have to take the time to sort it and look it up, so it’s very vital to include that in order to ensure timeliness of delivery, especially for students.
“Something I would highly recommend is using the ZIP plus four, which is just adding your four-digit box number to the ZIP code,” he said. “Just verifying the number would help our process to be a lot quicker, because we get roughly between 325 and 400 packages every day.”
Yet, despite the issues encountered by people on both sides of the mailroom window, one thing is agreed upon— Pepperdine’s mailing services are improving. Junior psychology major Julie Whitebread has noticed a positive change in the mailroom services during her three years at Pepperdine.
“I think they do a fine job, especially now that they have the electronic signature,” Whitebread said. “Before, they had to search for your name in a big book, so now it’s a lot faster and that’s really nice.”
Jones has noticed an improvement too, but in a different area of mail services.
“A lot of the improvement is that it now goes out of L.A. Annex instead of Malibu, and not the old
marina in Marina Del Rey,” he said. “But incoming mail is often delayed in the sorting process in L.A., and I’ve noticed that we have not been getting mail on a timely basis.”
There are easy ways to make shipping cheap and efficient. For normal partial post, go online to usps.com and click the calculated postage icon to find the cost of shipping. For priority mail, a flat-rate box can ship regardless of weight for $8.10.
For further questions regarding efficient mailing, contact the student mailbox center in the TAC.
02-22-2007
