Exonians Test Post Office Limits

From ladybugs to refrigerators to espresso machines, Exonians have ordered a myriad of odd packages to their Post Office Boxes in the past few years, only to see them intercepted by skeptical employees.With online shopping on the rise, students are starting to push the bounds of what is delivered to the school. Meanwhile, PO staff has had to notify the deans every time a suspicious package arrives at the Academy. Most recently, one senior ordered a friend 1,500 live ladybugs for his birthday. “I received an email that I got a box of ladybugs in my PO and that I should pick it up at Dean Mischke’s office,” senior Kihong Ahn, who was the recipient of the ladybugs, said. “ It turns out that the package had holes on the sides and a tag stating, ‘Live Animals Handle with Care.’ So the deans made me find a person on campus to take care of them, and my former biology teacher is going to feed them to her lizard.”Dean of Residential Life Arthur Cosgrove said, “If anything comes in, like a refrigerator, electric heater, something against the rules or obviously suspicious, then the Post Office staff give the deans a call. It is usually not a problem, we just ship these items back.”Ahn noted his worries and nervous anticipation before meeting with the administrators. “Thankfully, Dean Mischke and Dean Cosgrove handled it so well,” he said. “Students can easily freak out, and it makes more sense for the PO staff to settle things with the student in question. It should be sent to the deans only if it is something serious. ”Two years ago, a similar situation surrounding the Post Office involved an Exonian ordering a large number of sexual devices and mailing them to various people’s PO boxes, especially those in his dorm.“The student did it as joke, and there are were no ill intentions,” senior Victor Wang said. "It was just kind of funny and he ordered a bunch. It got out of hand and the devices came to PO so people threw them around, but that was not his original forethought.”The prank, although seemingly harmless, was not taken lightly by faculty. “We had a dorm meeting talking about it, and the faculty were very serious. It was a weird dorm meeting because the objects themselves aren't illegal, the instructors just did not understand why students had them,” an anonymous student in the dorm said.Along with these highly unusual purchases, Exonians more commonly buy items like espresso machines or fridges—prohibited in dorm rooms—that are still extracted by staff, even if the package abides by E-Book rules. “What I purchased was not a fridge, although Exeter thought it was. The container involved heatpipe technology, which uses the same voltage as a cooler, yet the school refused to let me have access to the cooler since they thought it was a fridge,” prep Darius Kahan said. “The package went into The Post Office, and they discerned out it was a fridge.”Kahan acknowledged the downsides of having a package intercepted by PO staff. “They refunded me for the cooler, but if I waited another day to contact them, the staff would have charged me a second time for the expensive shipping of the package.”Due to the varied responses from Exeter on each package, some questioned the rules behind ordering items to PO and how the staff deals with these situations. “We do not really have policies on what people order, since we do not get in the way of what people want to bring on campus for the most part,” Cosgrove said. “The line between appropriate and inappropriate should be governed by the E-Book,” upper Philip Chang added. “As for PO workers, I think they should be allowed to report suspicious items if it deserves merit.”Senior Rohan Pavuluri, a friend of the student who received the ladybugs, felt similarly. “Staff should have the right to report suspicious packages for the well-being of our community,” he said.But PO employees do not readily seek out packages that clash with E-Book rules, and they only raise an issue if a package is a rather blatant disregard for Academy requirements. As it is, staff are already overloaded with an influx of arriving packages. “Effective Monday, February 17, 2014, package pick-up for all students will be from 12:00 pm - 3:50 pm, Monday – Friday. The change is due to the significant increase in the package volume received at The Mailroom and the need to have more time to process these without continual interruption,” an email from Mailroom Supervisor Joseph Goudreault to students read.