Res. Living error to blame for mail found near Quad

U. Police investigating Monday incident Residential Living Director Gigi Simeone said employee error is to blame for first class letters found in a trash bag outside the Quadrangle mailroom Monday night. "We are looking into this very vigorously and taking this very seriously and we are very concerned that errors were made," Simeone said yesterday. The problem arose when three students opened the bag containing mail and called University Police. Simeone said Residential Living is considering several possible solutions to the problem. One possibility would be to have a supervisor look through all trash before it is thrown away. And another would be to create a system allowing students, who feel they are missing mail, to look through all misaddressed bulk mail. Early yesterday morning, Simeone said she went to University Police Headquarters and looked through "every piece of mail" in the bag. The majority of the mail was misaddressed bulk mail, Simeone said, adding that it is Penn Mail Service policy to discard misaddressed bulk mail. She said it is not unusual for there to be a trash bag filled with trash and discarded bulk mail outside the mailroom. Simeone also said, however, that there was correctly addressed bulk-mail that should have been delivered. Ten more pieces of misaddressed first class mail, which could be classified as commercial, were found in the bag. "Certainly the appearance of the pieces of mail was that they were junk mail," she said. "But the first class pieces should have been returned to the post office." Besides trash and discarded mail, Simeone said there were also old newspapers in the trash bag held over from winter break. The newspapers were thrown away after the posted deadline expired for picking them up, she added. This is not the only mail problem reported to Residential Living, though. Simeone said Monday night that her department has received more than 200 complaints since September. Still, she separated this case from the others. "I don't feel that there is a connection between this bag of trash and the more global problem with the mail delivery," Simeone said. Students said they are still not satisfied with the quality of the mail service they have been receiving, College junior Jason Straus said. "If it's ten [pieces of discarded first class mail] one day, it's ten every day," he said. "Other major Universities have no problems." Engineering freshman Matthew Grove is another student who has had recent mail troubles. But his troubles were particularly costly -- a paycheck for $1,077 which was sent in early December "never showed up," he said. Grove asked his employer to cancel the check and send it Federal Express to his home in New York. "I think that it's ridiculous that I had to have it Federal Expressed to Brooklyn so I could get it in Pennsylvania," he said. "I think someone should go to jail over this because it's a federal offense." Some students said because of the poor mail service in the Quad, they were considering renting mailboxes in Houston Hall. Others said they have asked people who send them letters frequently to make copies of the letters before mailing them. University Police Commissioner John Kuprevich said last night that University Police inspectors are currently investigating the mail service problem in conjunction with U.S. Postal inspectors.