The beginning of the new school year means many students are ordering their textbooks online and having them shipped to the dorms.
But the continual delays caused by the new centralized mailroom for the residential halls have prevented students from reading for class and turning in their homework on time.
“I needed to pick up one of my textbooks, but the line was way out the door, so I waited until late at night, when no one would be there, to come back,” said Sharon Peng, a second-year sociology and psychology student.
The new mailroom, which opened on Sept. 19, collects all mail in one location at Delta Terrace, rather than disbursing it among various smaller mailrooms in different residential halls.
The fact that students must wait and return multiple times to be able to receive their packages and letters is inconvenient and inefficient.
The new mailroom setup adds unnecessary hassle to already hectic student schedules. Picking up mail should be a largely effortless act, but now students find themselves planning their schedules around package pick-up and delivery.
Mail is important to students. Whether it’s a letter from home or a textbooks for their classes, students need their mail and are justifiably frustrated when they can’t get it.
UCLA Housing should consider returning to the old mail system because not only was it more convenient, but it was more efficient than the new system, minimizing frustration from students.
Steve Dundish, east area manager of UCLA Housing and Hospitality Services’ Rooms Division told the Daily Bruin last week the new mailroom was instituted because bringing all the mail to one location is more efficient both space-wise and time-wise than the old mail system.
However, the long lines and annoyed students indicate it is simply not the case that the consolidated system represents an improvement.
To alleviate these problems, the Office of Residential Life is instituting a new package logging system, which is supposed to scan barcodes on mail to notify students immediately upon arrival and cut down the time it takes for students to receive their packages.
But the new software should have been put into place before the year started in order to be ready for the influx of students and their mail.
The facility already has a reputation among students for its long lines and for turning people away because their letters or packages haven’t been found yet.
Some students have been waiting to receive their mail since they arrived on campus.
“I’ve been waiting for a letter since I moved in, and they keep turning me away by telling me that they’ll have it sorted out in two to three days,” said Rachel O’Keefe, a second-year biology student.
In addition to long lines and misplaced packages, students have found the location of the mailroom to be inconvenient.
Previously, mailrooms were located in five different locations, meaning students could pick up letters and packages at their convenience. Now, students have to plan ahead to make trips to get their mail, only to find that they have to wait in an extremely long line.
These are essential problems with a centralized mailroom for a facility that houses over 10,000 students.
It shouldn’t be this difficult to pick up a single letter from home or a textbook for class. The old mailing system on the hill was efficient enough, and students were satisfied.
Returning to the old system would not be step backwards, as the centralized facility was never a step forward in the first place.
It sucks!
The new mail room definitely makes me want to live off campus next year. I can only imagine how many time sensitive packages/letters are delayed because of the new system. It’s just not worth the hassle.
Maybe if they get their crap together soon I might change my mind.
I love getting my priority mail three days after it arrives. So much for priority?? I had to delay starting work on campus because of this.. I had important documents coming in that I needed to present before beginning work. The mailroom is literally costing me time and money. Also, the other day, I was waiting in line (which of course, took like 45 minutes) and the front desk worker give a guy the wrong package. He opened it and came back to return it. It was some expensive watch. I mean really??? Great guy, coulda kept it, but he did the right thing… didn’t even hear an apology from the worker. It’s ridiculous. They’re also always saying “we can’t find your packages… you must have picked it up yesterday”… well then why dont you make sure that it’s logged correctly!! Which of these packages that you can’t find and we supposedly already picked up is actually a package you just misplaced!!! Ridiculous. Am I really paying $12k a year for this? This has to be changed! Hire two more people to work in the front so the lines go by faster or something.
As a current mailroom employee, I definitely understand a lot of your frustrations, but you can’t take it out on us, students, who are in turn just part time employees and being told to do what Housing management tells us to do. The mailroom staff, myself included, wasn’t hired until the Monday before move in weekend. To top it off, we didn’t start collecting packages and mail until the Thursday of move in weekend. Dorms such as Reiber, Hedrick, Sproul, all had been receiving packages for the entire summer, but had stopped logging them because they wanted it to be the central mailroom’s problem. By the time move in weekend did come, we had over 40,000 packages and over 15,000 pieces of letter mail. Coupled with the fact that only 12 people were hired for mailroom, everyone was working 45+ hours a week, and may I remind you the mailroom should be staffed by a MINIMUM of 30 workers at all time. The old system we used was web based, and it was only made to store packages for one dorm, because we now had to store the whole hill on this one system we experienced numerous technical difficulties and sometimes the entire system would just all together crash. The new Delta mailroom is so small, we’ve run out of places to store packages, we store behind doors, in the break room, by the windows, which is why it’s so hard to find them sometimes. Also, our managers had the idiotic idea of having the mailroom open 24 hours the first week, this impeded our work a lot. Instead of focusing on logging packages and sorting mail, someone always had to man the front the desk and help out students, limit how much we could get done. The mailroom is horrible because the Housing managers did not organize and plan it well, but students wrongly take the blame out on us front desk workers. And while I agree you have every right to be angry, it would be more constructive if you emailed Housing and gave them a critique instead of yelling at the poor mailroom worker whose doing what he’s told.
I cant agree more with this article. The new mailroom plain ole sucks. I went to UCLA back in 2010 and lived in De Neve, back then getting your mail was very quick and easy. Now? There ALWAYS is a LONG line. Very long. I am hesitant to use my Amazon Prime. UCLA needs to do something about this.
The new mailroom is awful. It is “easier” only for the higher ups in housing admin and USPS, who get to do one check box saying “Yes! Today we got mail!” Student workers are stressed and overworked. Students who just want their mail are upset. Heck, I have been waiting for some very important letter mail since the start of the quarter now, and it still hasn’t reached my box. This system was implemented very lazily, and now everyone on campus is paying for it. That $2.3 million could have been spent in so many other ways.
I think the reason they wanted to centralize the mail room is so they don’t have to hire more mail clerks for the new buildings. Housing rates raised this year. If I’m paying more, I want a mail room in my building!