By Lisa Nault
Staff Writer

Imagine, you have just returned to Simmons after spending a semester abroad. In my case, the foreign land I studied in was that of Vermont. You are back, eating Bartol food, seeing friends you have not seen in a while, and going to your classes. Now imagine, your mother says that she has sent you a letter in the mail. You start checking your mailbox every few days but still nothing. Even stranger is there is nothing in your mailbox at all, not even coupons. Two or three weeks go by and finally you decide to check with the mailroom to see if there is a problem. That is when you discover that the mailroom has actually changed your mailbox because you were not there for a semester—but they did not tell you. That is what happened to me the other day.
I found it strange that they did not inform me that my mailbox had changed, especially because I had been opening a mailbox that was not mine anymore. They could have given my old mailbox to someone else and I would not have known. I found it stranger that not all people who study abroad have their mailbox changed. My roommate Ellen Garnett went to Granada, Spain, and nobody moved her box. Another friend of mine went to Copenhagen, Denmark, last semester, and she also has the same mailbox. We had all took credits for Simmons so we were all still regarded as Simmons students.
This is not the first time that the Simmons mailroom has let people down. There have been many complaints regarding the conduct of the mailroom from various people.
Junior Kaydee Donohoo had problems with receiving letters for different reasons. “Last year I was expecting two important letters, one being the last of my work money for the summer,” she explained. “It took weeks/months longer than it should have and through gossip in the mailroom I learned that they had not gotten into my mailbox.”
Another student who dealt with an unsatisfactory mailroom experience was sophomore Molly Reagan. Molly told me that she “ordered from Amazon a Vera Bradley ID holder and Simmons told me it arrived and Amazon said it was delivered. This happened last spring and the mailroom said they did not have it. They said they would get back to me if they found it but never did. This fall I went to get another package and they gave me that one. I had already bought another [id holder] so now I have two.”
Even when students fill out the paperwork to get their mail forwarded to them, the mailroom does not always deliver. Senior Ellen Garnett described how the mailroom interfered with her receiving jury duty.
“I received a jury duty notice over the summer and although I had filled out the necessary paperwork for my mail to be forwarded to me at my home address I did not receive my jury duty notice,” she said. “So once I got back to college I had to contact Suffolk Superior Courthouse and arrange for another date of serve. But it was a major inconvenience; it was an unnecessary stressor.”
The people who work at the mailroom are doing their jobs, but there have been plenty of problems that need to be addressed. When an issue arises they should learn from it to prevent it in the future. Hopefully, there will be fewer stories about mailroom mishaps in the future.