Students received an email from UPS Mailroom this afternoon (address ups.yale@gmail.com) announcing that the mailroom was too full to receive new packages and that over 600 packages are “sitting in a trailer somewhere in Orange, C.T., gathering dust.”

The e-mail exhorted students to pick up old packages left over from the holiday season to free up space for the new ones. “They’re probably really, really fun presents that you could be playing with instead of letting them take up space in a depressing mailroom,” the message said, continuing that “our unionized employees don’t really care if they ever get to you.”

While the e-mail may have seemed like a joke, Susan Rosenberg, a spokesperson from the UPS corporate office in Atlanta, said Hendrie Hall did indeed face a “capacity issue.” Both yesterday and today, UPS deliveries were turned away because Yale Station was full and could not accept them, Rosenberg said.

The packages “were brought, but there just wasn’t the campus personnel or facility space,” she said. While she could not confirm the number of the packages, she said they are in the UPS distribution center in Orange, C.T.

Lest students be deterred by the treacherous weather, the e-mail said “a walk through freezing rain and ice” would be worth the sacrifice for good citizenship.

UPS will try delivering the packages again tomorrow, and every day after that, until they are accepted, as per company protocol, Rosenberg said.

Correction: January 24, 2011

An earlier version of this post incorrectly referred to Hendrie Hall as Yale Station in Hendrie Hall.