Sunday night, after I found out the Of Montreal show in Cambridge sold out, I was thinking to myself how great it would be if I could just put on a few tunes, lay down and actually get some reading done. What a novel concept! I could actually be diligent and get a jump start on a few of the textbooks in some of my classes. But, oh wait, in order to do that … I’d actually have to have the books.

Say what you will about me buying my books online and finding myself waiting for them in the first place. Instead of paying the drastically inflated prices at the school’s bookstore, I saved $100 from online retailers. And let’s be honest, one week into the fall semester, having an extra $100 in my pocket is all I could really care about.

But anyway, the reason I didn’t have my books wasn’t Amazon’s fault, or Barnes ‘ Noble’s, or even my own for that matter. It was because a full week into the semester, I, along with my roommates in 780 Columbus Ave., still do not have a key for our mailbox. Two of my roommates moved in nearly two weeks before me and there was no sign of a key then, either. Let’s do the math here: that’s a grand total of three long, sad, key-less weeks.

So those CDs that were supposed to be shipped to me a week ago? Yeah, those are (presumably) in my mailbox. The package my parents sent me with some of my bills and all of my forwarded mail? Yeah, it’s probably sitting in the mailbox. My roommate’s paycheck from several weeks ago? Right there with the CDs and the bills and the textbooks. Any notices the school’s been trying to send to us? You guessed it: Mailbox. My roommates and I walk by that metal box countless times throughout the day, sometimes upwards of 10 times a day, but can we open it? No.

We’ve all completed the room condition form, the form ResLife must have in order to dispense keys, but for some reason, or so we’ve been told, there’s never been a mail key for our apartment and there won’t be until the “key place” (the Resident Assistant’s words, not mine) makes us a new one. Of course, after we wait this undetermined amount of time (weeks? months? semesters?), there’s no telling how long we’ll wait until the key is actually in our hands.

I can’t place the blame on ResMail since they don’t deal with this side of campus but the United States Postal Service does, and thus must weather my complaints. But, what am I to do? Wait around for the mailman (or mailwoman) all day so if we happen to catch them with mailbag in tow, putting mail into our slot, he or she will hopefully let us snag our mail? Are my roommates and I supposed to leave the postman a crudely-written letter taped to our mailbox explaining our predicament? What are they going to do – whip out their cell phone, dial me up, have me leave my class and meet me on the corner so I can to retrieve my mail? As far as I can see, the only help the post office is going to provide is when the mail in the box gets so full they start leaving it at the post office. But, even after that, isn’t there a grace period before they return it to sender?

Of course, after calling the Mission Hill post office, the office that handles the bulk of the mail for our section of Columbus Avenue, and explaining my problem, I got the following response: “Oh, I’m sorry, there’s really nothing we can do; we don’t have individual mail keys we can give out – you’ll have to take that up with your management.” Great.

Oh, and according to their bylaws, Security Representatives (SRs) aren’t allowed to take people’s mail, so I suppose that rules out the possibility of letting an SR hold on to it while we’re all in class.

But I digress. Maybe it’s me, but I just fail to see how out of 110 apartments, our apartment is seemingly the only one whose mail key is M.I.A. and after trying again and again, how virtually impossible it is to get our mail, regardless of how imperative or urgent it may be.

Therefore, any help would be appreciated. At this point, I’m certainly open to suggestions.

– Chris Brook is a middler journalism major and a member of the News staff