Sometimes I have days when I want to address some broad social problem through artful rhetoric, hoping to evince the day’s ills by exposing sweeping problems that ought to be addressed on a national scale. Then there are days when I don’t get my mail on time and I just feel like complaining about it.

Allow me to explain. Over Labor Day weekend I enjoyed a relaxing out-of-town vacation where I could, for the span of about three days, forget about schoolwork and my various jobs on campus. Then, the unthinkable happened: the day before coming back into town I tripped, fell face forward to the ground and broke my only pair of glasses (a pair that, when I bought a year and a half ago, were advertised to me as “virtually indestructible.”)

Luckily I was able to finagle the defunct lenses in such a way that they would stay on my face so I wasn’t completely blind for the rest of the trip and I did have a pair of contacts waiting for me in my dorm when I got back to Dallas. However, my allergies have proven quite the obstacle to wearing my contacts year-round, and unless I hoped to look like a 1950s sci-fi superhero, my broken glasses simply weren’t going to cut it. I needed a new pair of glasses and I needed them soon.

My eternally sagacious mother was prompt in procuring my prescription for a new pair of lenses, and she decided to pay an exorbitant sum to overnight it to me so I could have it before the week ended.

I checked my mailbox on Wednesday, but to no avail. Of course complications can always arise in the mail system so I wasn’t one to lose much sleep over it. I was certain the prescription would arrive by Thursday. However, Thursday came, and my expectations were again shattered. “Friday for sure,” I thought to myself. However, Friday bore no such luck.

Fed up with waiting, I decided that my package must have been somewhere in the SMU Post Office, likely ignored among the countless other letters people receive each day.

When I came back on Saturday to find once again that the package was not in my box, I approached the front counter and asked the attendant to check in the back for it. Sure enough, she came back with the package in hand; God only knows how long it might have been sitting there.

Is my complaint relatively mundane? Could I not have just had the prescription faxed in the first place? Perhaps, but my point still stands. People depend upon getting their mail on time, and when it comes to situations like this, time is of the essence.

Also, this isn’t the first time that the post office on campus has transgressed like this: a few weeks ago when I paid for two day shipping for a textbook for class I didn’t receive it until five days later and I’d already missed several reading assignments for the class.

Consider a situation like this: If one receives a newspaper subscription, it doesn’t exactly help to receive that paper two days after its publication date when the news might not even be relevant anymore, yet this exact thing has happened to my roommate since the school year started. To date this semester, I believe he’s not yet received his Wall Street

Journal subscription on the proper day.

I know these problems can’t be blamed entirely on the post office; as we well know, the U.S. Postal Service in general has a laundry list of problems. Moreover, I know that the people who work at the post office on campus have a difficult enough job as it is. However, I think the post office on campus owes it to the students to make sure that everyone’s mail gets to the proper box in a timely manner.

Brandon Bub is a sophomore majoring in English and edits The Daily Campus opinion column. He can be reached for comment at [email protected]