After Freitag finishes chatting with Guinart-Carrero about his intersession, she begins to insert invitations to the First-Year Formal into boxes 1200-1300.

She stops at box 1286, which is stuffed with a Wall Street Journal, a Leader-Courier and several envelopes.

“I know he’s getting another Wall Street Journal today,” she explains, filling out a yellow card asking Greg E. Cook ’05 to clear out his box. “It’s just too full,” she sighs.

Some first-years have never emptied their mailboxes.

“Last week someone came in and said, ‘I didn’t even know I had a mailbox,’” Romeo remembers. “How can you not know you have a mailbox? Maybe they’re just really into e-mail.”

Students aren’t the only ones who infrequently check their boxes.

“The only thing I don’t like to do is the proctors, because they never check their mail, so you have to ram your hand in,” says Riley.

The rough edges of each metallic box sometimes cause workers to nick and cut themselves when reaching into their dark and crowded interiors.

A bandage on Riley’s finger covers a cut he received while working last week.

“I’m a casualty of the mailroom,” he says.

Fortunately there were no casualties to the anthrax scare that struck the nation’s mailrooms four months ago—though workers wore gloves for two months.

Though he’s more susceptible to paper cuts now, Riley is glad the threat has passed.

“I just feel better manipulating the mail without gloves,” he says.

Gloves or not, Riley greatly prefers this job over his last one at the Cambridge Savings Bank, where he processed envelopes at a machine all day.

“There are so many things to do here—that’s one of the reasons I took this job,” he says.