Along with Harvard University mail employee Jeff Saeger, Aliaa Remtilla ’05 looks for her package in the Quincy package depot across from Lowell House. Some packages have not been claimed for weeks.

When Sarah M. Poage ’05 went to pick up her package, she found that what had once been a gift from a loved one was now the victim of package depot pandemonium. “I just about started to cry, holding my dead flowers and stale cookies, and told [the distributor] that I was just so disappointed that the kind things others had tried to do for me had gone to waste,” Poage said.

For the past month, parcels shipped to undergraduate houses have been processed and distributed at centralized package depots, alleviating anxiety for superintendents but increasing it for students.

Every year, packages are diverted from house offices to these centralized locations to help House superintendents deal with the daily influx of nearly 200 deliveries—mostly personal belongings and textbook orders—at the beginning of the school year. A total of four depots servicing three houses each receive shipments from postal carriers daily and inventory packages into large storage trailers.

Because the depot must first inform the superintendents before they can inform students of package arrival via e-mail (in every house except Lowell, which uses mailbox slips), there is typically a delay of at least half a day. Students who track their package through the carrier directly, however, do not always get the correct information regarding the arrival date. As a result, the package depots sometimes entertain the same student visitors multiple times a day.

Greg L. Parish ’07 has visited the depot nearly 15 times without avail.

“This is not my first time [here] and it won’t be my last,” Parish said. “It’s very emotional because you’re not sure if your things have been picked through or if they are being watched.”

But superintendents say the system is essential to facilitating operations in the hectic early weeks of the year.

“The depot gives the building managers more time to handle other complaints,” Leverett house Superintendent Paul J. Hegarty said. “Otherwise, I’m in package hell.”

“We need as much help as we can get,” Mather Superintendent Miguel Casillas Jr. said. “So far it’s been working well.”

But students complain that finding a parcel amidst the mayhem can be frustrating.

“There is no real system,” Mona S. Stoicescu ’05 said. “You have to look through all of the [packages]. People just leave their stuff here and it adds to all the clutter.”

Packages dating back to the second week of September can still be found wedged between boxes. And especially during the peak hours at noon and before closing at 4 p.m., people tend to displace the numerically-ordered parcels when searching for their own, making it a burden for subsequent searchers.

Dorm Crew workers manned the stations until the start of the academic year, when they turned the job over to outside contractors. Despite being swamped, the distributors say they work to cater to students’ demands and busy schedules, and have developed modes of organization and protocol necessary for efficiently retrieving articles. Some even stay open past regular hours of operation.

“You bend over backwards for [students],” Package Distributor Joseph P. Toffoloni said. “You have to cooperate.”

Despite this claim, many students complained about the inconvenience of depots and questioned their continuation.