The worst day of my life was the day that I got lost among the packages in the mailroom at St. Olaf College.
I am a post office worker – one of the smiling elves who conveniently produces your package from the teetering stacks of mail and delivers it to your hands as quickly as possible every day of the week.
Most of the time, the job is very easy, except for those terrifying days at the beginning of the year when we are attacked with an onslaught of ladders and textbooks and plastic skeletons and bicycles and pumpkins and vaulting poles and care packages for first-years from Mummy. During these busy times, working at the post office is an Olympic event involving sprinting at top speed, lifting impossibly heavy parcels and balancing stacks of too many boxes.
It was during one of those barbaric, devastating mail days when I got lost in the mail.
I was searching in the letter “S” section for one package among hundreds when I found myself teleported into the magical, nightmarish land of lost packages. I wandered among rows and rows of clutter, where I found not only missing mail, but a treasure trove of displaced things. I stumbled upon oodles of tater tots, the College Republicans’ dignity, free time, PDA’s Desk, overlooked flirts, Stumpy’s tail and forgotten Friday flowers.
Finally, underneath a pile of unwanted P.O. box flyers, I found the package: one for a Solveig Selvig. When I returned from that mysterious haunted land amongst the packages to the real world, I realized that I had the wrong package. This was for Solveig A Selvig and I needed one for Solveig B Selvig.
WHY do you all have to have the same name? Please change your names, for the sake of all the post office workers. Furthermore, just stop ordering mail altogether. Do you really need that-specific-flavor-of-powerade-I-can’t-find-anywhere-else, or Target deliveries from the Target in Northfield or more cute Redbubble stickers for your laptop?
Please, Oles, just stop ordering mail, lest more mailroom workers get lost among the packages.
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Madeline Everett ’22 is from Crookston, Minn. Her major is English.
