Mailboxes

Today myself and a couple of classmates decided to sign up for our mailboxes which are conveniently located in Charter Hall on campus not to far from our classrooms or dorms. To sign up for a mailbox, you simply go in, present your student ID, and are assigned a box and given a combination for the lock. Quick, simple, painless...right?

Actually, as it turns out, 3 intelligent people who have made it this far to veterinary school are incapable of figuring out the combination lock system without guidance! One after the other, we read the instructions and gave it a shot, and failed each time.

Being resourceful students, we politely asked for help (feeling quite foolish!). The good news is that after we were shown how to do it once, we were each able to replicate the results and open the mailboxes! As it turns out, the combination lock numbers appear to be more of an approximation than the actual code, and the instructions don't really mean what they say. Made me feel a little less incompetent! After all, how hard can it really be to open a lock?! 20 minutes later and we had the answer to that question!

So now we have mailboxes, we know how to open them, and we have a basic understanding of how the mail system works. Letters and tiny envelopes will make their way to campus to our boxes but packages will be held off campus at the island post office where we will have to retrieve them, open them at the office, and pay taxes on everything inside. Lots of students use the mail system here and even receive packages, so it can't be as complex and frustrating as it sounds.

Lastly, much to my amusement, the island keeps with it's theme "what you see is what you get." There are no fancy confusing names for places here. The golf course is simply called the golf course, the fish market is called the fish market, and so on. Keeping with that theme, it would then make sense that the only bit of the mail address that changes per student is the name and box number. It reads something like this:
Your Name, Your Box No. (mine is 3405-hopefully I remember that!)
St. George's University
P.O. Box 7
University Centre
St. George's
Grenada, West Indies

Not difficult at all. School, school's address, building location, town we're in, island. The only thing that changes between students is name and box number. So now I have a mailbox!