Problems of years past persist under new administration.
For several years now, residents of Norman Village on campus have not been able to get letters or other similar mail delivered to them. Instead, all of their mail goes to the mailroom in the Allen Chapman Student Union on the other side of campus. This is because, a few years ago, the mailboxes were burned down and have not been replaced.
The lack of mailboxes in Norman leaves both students and mailroom staff greatly inconvenienced and with extra unnecessary work. Students can only pick up their mail from 8:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays, while the mail staff has to do the extra work of sorting and storing the mail that would otherwise normally go to mailboxes. Junior Norman resident Aiden Hoogstra complained, “I like to write my friends from high school, so it’s a bit annoying not to be able to get mail over the weekend or after 5 o’clock. I also know that it’s an extra burden on the mail room guys, who are awesome and already do a ton.” Another resident, junior Ian Orr, has had similar issues with not having a mailbox. He stated, “I requested a mail-in ballot application form from the state of Texas. … I believe it was mailed and probably arrived in September, but I did not ever receive it.” Because he did not receive a ballot application, he said, “I ended up printing and sending the application myself, and I received a notification that my ballot had arrived on Oct. 22. I asked the mailroom if I had any mail before that date expecting them to have my ballot application, but they said they had nothing.” Orr felt like the most likely explanation for not having received his ballot application is due to some kind of misorganization that happened at the mailroom: “If there were a mailbox at Norman, I believe none of this confusion would have happened. I would have received the application in my mailbox rather than it seemingly being mixed up at the mailroom.”
The frustration at the inconvenience of the whole thing is quite understandable. It is a fairly easy task to check your mailbox, and is something every other student on campus can do. However, students in Norman have to make sure they do not miss notifications from the mailroom, which often gets marked as unimportant, and then remember to go pick up said mail during the relatively limited operating hours. This also means that the people working the mailroom, who are already very busy, have that much more to deal with during their day. While this inconvenience is very annoying, the much bigger issue, as Hoogstra puts it, is that “it’s mostly frustrating because of what a quick fix it should be and how long it’s remained un-fixed.” While putting in new mail boxes is not trivial, it certainly should not be a monumental task for the university either, especially not enough to delay it several years. The university’s inaction on this subject makes it clear that administration has no plans to replace the mailboxes, especially without enough student criticism to motivate them to do so.
While Norman residents sometimes complain among themselves about the situation, many students choose not to complain much beyond that. This may in part be because many do not know that Norman at one point had them, and that it is a potential option to put them back in the future. When he was told that Norman used to have mailboxes, computer science junior Michael Burford said, “Really? I didn’t know that.” For many people, the lack of mailboxes is simply the status quo and there is no point in trying to convince the university to break from that status quo. However, the real truth is that Norman had mailboxes for a very long time, and it should rightfully have them again. This goes to show that the university will take any chance it can to cheap out on housing, especially on non-essential issues like having mailboxes or not. While the budget has been tight, this lack of action from the university shows once again that they are willing to cut corners and lessen the student experience as long as they can get away with it.
