U.S. Post Offices @ Rutgers offer welcome campus presence
Archived article from Dec 15, 2003
By Sue Burghard Brooks
Everyone knows that lines abound at U.S. Post Offices now as people send holiday cards and gift packages around the world.
What many at Rutgers don’t realize is that there are convenient on-campus U.S. Post Office facilities on each New Brunswick/Piscataway campus as part of the mail and document services operation. These shops are under contract with the U.S. Postal Service and offer such services as sales of holiday and regular stamps, money orders and special-service items, including express and registered mail.
To avoid long lines at the Rutgers facilities, Bob Gasecki, supervisor of the campus post offices, known as “student post offices,” advises that customers arrive before noon, when students are finishing morning classes and heading to get their mail.
Mail and document services for New Brunswick/Piscataway campuses, headquartered at 31 Postal Plaza on the Livingston campus, serves as the largest hub of mail processing activities for the university. The department is staffed by 35 full-time employees and a dozen or so part-timers and students. The shop manages a distribution network encompassing 10 mail routes, 425 mail stops and the five campus post offices. It also serves as the central site for connecting to the Camden and Newark mail operations. With the advent of e-mail, predictions ran rampant that the Internet might be the death of snail mail. However, the quantity of post office mail at Rutgers hasn’t necessarily slowed, notes Jesse Rambo, who heads the New Brunswick/Piscataway mail and document services operation. In fact, the department processed 850,000 pieces of departmental mail and 155,000 pieces of student mail in October, which is fairly average.
“We’ve seen a slight decline in the amount of first-class mail, but the prevalence of packages has skyrocketed, particularly those containing textbooks,” says Rambo. “There’s a trend these days for students to sell their used textbooks to other students over the Internet — where they can command a higher price — rather than selling them back to a bookstore,” adds Gasecki.
Rambo has seen some unusual things pass through 31 Postal Plaza: Baby chicks, sea frogs, car parts, lacrosse sticks, unlocked suit cases and boxes of surgical masks bound for Hong Kong during the SARS scare are just some of the interesting items his team has handled.
The mailroom staff has also found an occasional package with a mysterious white powder residue, causing them to deploy official security procedures. (The powder was later deemed harmless by authorities.) Lately, incoming envelopes bearing hate messages have prompted security measures, as well.
Tom Stadthaus, supervisor of distribution services, and Max Blankenstein, digital support specialist, recall the time a few years ago when 31 Postal Plaza was invaded. Thousands of crickets were swarming the area, causing mayhem in a mail van and hopping helter-skelter down hallways. Who had unleashed this plague of near-biblical proportions?
Somehow, en route to campus, a large box of crickets destined for a Rutgers entomology lab had sprung a leak. Once the source was discovered, staffers calmly corralled and captured as many of the crickets as they could, and coaxed them back into their now-reinforced cardboard confines.
One of the more visible changes that has taken place in the mail processing business is that mail no longer arrives in bundles bound with rubber bands. Instead, bins and bags are used to transport loose mail. Sue Caseiro, a 19-year mail services employee, has memorialized that postal service “antiquity.” Over the past decade, she has been assembling a rubber-band ball. Soon, the novelty, which tips the scales at more than 100 pounds, won’t be able to fit out the door.
On the Newark campus, supervisor Victor Walker, a 30-year Rutgers postal services veteran, oversees a full-time staff of four who process the mail and manage the sales counter where students and staff can purchase stamps and send packages under one pound via express and certified mail. In September, Walker’s operation was updated with new sorting bins and flooring, as well as new meter machines. Walker is also proud of a new display case, which enables him to post costs, services and notices.
Camden’s mail services team, under the direction of Mary Krebs, also will soon be updated with a holiday gift from Rutgers: a new facility. The group, which processes incoming and outgoing mail only for staff and students, is moving out of the basement of the student center into a renovated historic building on campus. A grand opening celebration is slated to take place soon. According to Mark Rozewski, associate provost for administration at Camden, the unnamed building will be christened with a title befitting its status: the Post Office. The new mail facility is at the intersection of Fourth and Lawrence streets.
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