OK, so you’ve probably dealt with Northwestern’s Evanston campus mailrooms before. If you haven’t, you either a) don’t go to Northwestern or b) totally aren’t ready to be living on your own. Because seriously, even in this age of Twitter and Blackboard and Tumblr, some transaction simply must be conducted in actual physical space. Which, in theory, is what the mailrooms are for.
If you have dealt with the mailrooms before, you’ll know that they’re run in large part by your peers and sometimes — if your one of the few Northwestern students lucky enough to have them — your friends. Accordingly, while the mailrooms are often just as thoughtful and conscientious as your friends at their best, the mailrooms can also be just as flaky and scatterbrained and self-indulgent as that one person you know who’s always on Facebook chat complaining about how they never get enough sleep. Which doesn’t mean you stop loving them.
But in order to stay on-track and sane, sometimes even your friends need a bit of a reality check. Which is why North by Northwestern decided to test Northwestern’s mail services by sending eight packages of chocolate to students via each mailroom. Each package took two business days to arrive at the actual mailroom (according to usps.com). What we at NBN were interested in is how long it took after the initial delivery for each mailroom to process the packages and notify their recipients (usually via a slip in the mailbox) of their arrival.
To augment this data, NBN assigned one exceptionally earnest-yet-suave reporter to visit each of the mailrooms in person, so that he might better capture their essential natures in writing. Along the way, he learned a little about his campus, himself and human nature.
Some points of interest include: the physical/logistic set-up of the place, its current organizational status (i.e. degree messiness) and the overall atmospheric vibe. It should be noted that the bulk of the following data and remarks were generated within the first week or two of class, which is when the mailrooms are most clogged with shady and irregularly-packaged Amazon and eBay deliveries and so should be taken only to represent their performance at the further end of the stress-spectrum.
Production by Alexis Sanchez / North by Northwestern.