“I can never get this to work,” a female first-year complains, as Freitag delivers a half-dozen issues of Esquire.

Though she succeeds in opening her postal vault, many don’t.

“In September, we get a lot of that, which is understandable,” Riley says. “But even to the very last day, we get people coming in who forgot their combination, forgot their box number or can’t open their box.”

As Stevie Nicks’ “Landslide” plays on the radio, a student asks if he needs to add another stamp to his oversized envelope.

Riley places it on a small digital scale as Freitag and McClary consult a chart.

“Two ounces? Oh, I’d put another stamp on there,” McClary tells the first-year.

Freitag walks to the table in the center of the front mailroom to sort Land’s End catalogues, passing the yellow paper blocking off box 1157, in the highest of 10 rows of boxes.

“She was about this tall,” McClary says of the first-year formerly known as box 1157, placing his flattened hang perpendicular to his sternum. “So we moved her to box 2745.”

McClary—a 40-year Harvard employee who worked as a physics lab technician before coming to the Science Center—is responsible for introducing others to the mailroom.

Around spring break, McClary starts recruiting students to help during the busiest mailroom time of the year: move-in week.

Last September 7313 packages arrived in the mailroom, 85 percent of which came during move-in week, according to the records from McClary’s makeshift file cabinet, a U.S. Postal Service plastic tub.

There are so many packages that they can’t fit in the mailroom and must be secured in chemistry labs on the first floor of the building

Jakub J. Kabala ’04, one of three undergraduates who worked in the mailroom last September, said the heavy flow of packages makes for strenuous work.

“Sometimes I’d be totally dripping with sweat and dirty from the boxes,” he recalls.

But he says McClary, Freitag, Romeo, Riley and Nassim Kerkache (who was on vacation this week) made the experience enjoyable.