Students not abiding by rules set up by the U.S. Postal Service might find their letters lost in the shuffle or taking longer to reach family and friends.
Every customer of the DeKalb Post Office should receive a booklet this week which will guide them along the path of addressing a letter. Although many students learned to complete this task in grade school, many more are not following the rules set up by the Postal Service.
“The rules aren’t new, they’re just old rules that aren’t being used,” said DeKalb Post Office Superintendent Charlie Sharp.
Mail is to be addressed with all capital letters; no lower case letters should be used. Also, no punctuation is to be used and the proper abbreviations must be used, Sharp said.
It appears, however, that students are not the only culprits of poorly addressed mail, said Ron Smith, assistant campus mail superintendant. He said everybody seems to have problems with addressing mail, particularly when using abbreviations.
“We don’t like abbreviations. They mess things up,” Smith said.
Sharp said if abbreviations are not used correctly, mail cannot be sorted electronically and must then be sorted by hand, which slows down the mail process.
andwritten envelopes also slow down the sorting process, because the electronic system can only be used with type-written envelopes, Sharp said.
“There is a major problem with the way mail is addressed to the university,” said Joe Baird, campus mail associate director.
He said a common problem people seem to have with addressing letters to the university is no department name used in the address.
If a department name is not used in the address, NIU’s mail service has no way of knowing where the letter is supposed to be delivered, which slows down the process, Baird said. Mail is delivered by department name, therefore addresses must include the name of a specific major department, he said.