Work at the campus post office ebbs and flows throughout the year, but during the fall semester, the workload greatly increases.

Postal Services Supervisor Jon Lane said, “This is our busiest time of the year. We have more students enrolled in the fall than in any other semester.”

This means chaos for Lane and his employees at the post office, but there is hope if he can get the proper assistance.

“It’s good if we have experienced help this time of year so that we can help monitor the situation and get the new students in and out and going in the right direction. We have an influx of incoming freshmen and it’s all new to them,” Lane said.

With family members and friends sending things like letters, care packages and dorm room appliances, the employees working at the post office find it easy to keep themselves busy.

Postal clerk Brenda Stewart said, “We never have trouble staying busy this time of year. Everybody is getting used to how everything goes around here so we get lots of questions, people forgetting mailbox numbers, students ordering things for their dorms and so on.”

However, things like care packages and dorm room decor only make up a fraction of the mail that goes through the post office, thanks to companies like Chegg and Amazon Prime.

“I would bet around 70 to 75 percent of the mail we get this time of year is textbooks,” Stewart said.

What Stewart said was no exaggeration as there was a heaping pile of orange cardboard boxes in the corner of the mail room.

Lane added, “The ability to rent textbooks nowadays makes our job extremely more difficult because we have hundreds of packages coming in every day now at the first part of the semester. You know, for each class a student has, they’re going to need at least one book that is required, and if you average 15 hours a semester, that’s an average of five classes, so it’s a minimum of five books for each student. Multiply that by the 2,000 or so students that live on campus and that’s a lot of packages that come in every day.”

All this being said, Lane has a method to keep things running as smoothly as possible as the semester goes on.

“As the main person in charge of the post office, I strive to keep things at a steady pace where we can stay ahead of the game, meet the customers’ needs and answer any questions that new students might have,” Lane said.

The last thing Lane said he does to keep things running smoothly is try to keep a trained staff available throughout the day, every day.

Lane said, “With graduation in December and even in May, we do have turnover so we have to bring in new students periodically, but I do my best to stagger them to where I don’t have all seniors or all freshmen. I have a good mixture of all, that way I can still have the same crew for two or three years in a row.”