Postmark Duke:

At 5:15 a.m., Robyn Johnson stepped inside the quiet, dimly lit building off Hillsborough Road and flipped a light switch. Within a few minutes, the 10,000-square-foot warehouse, where all Duke mail passes, buzzed with activity.

Envelopes zipped through a whirring sorting machine. Metal carts packed with parcels rattled as Duke Postal employees pushed them to sorting areas and awaited the arrival of a U.S. Postal truck carrying morning mail.

"We jump right into high gear in the mornings," said Johnson, a sorting supervisor who has worked a decade at Duke. "It's true what they say about rain, sleet and snow. The mail has to be delivered."

A unit within Campus Services, Duke Postal Operations sorts, meters and delivers 12 million pieces of mail annually for about 50,000 staff, faculty, students, departments and patients, making it one of the busiest private postal operations in the state.

Duke Postal has evolved since the early 1980s when a handful of employees used index cards to address and sort campus mail from the West Union building. Now, computers track parcels, machines sort letters, scanners collect signatures for packages, and Duke mail carriers drive dozens of miles daily, delivering to Duke offices across the university, health system and downtown.

"It's been an incredible transformation," said Mike Trogdon, director of Duke Postal Operations. "Many people don't realize that we're the largest postal customer in the city of Durham, and we have more technology and more routes than your average rural town post office in North Carolina." Sorting It Out

Just after 5:30 a.m., the first U.S. Postal truck backed up to the loading dock at the warehouse. A driver rolled metal cages and cloth hampers filled with first-class letters, scientific journals and other parcels into the building.

Duke Postal Clerk Earl Robinson quickly rolled the mail carts to the sorting area. Another U.S. Postal truck was expected to bring more mail in an hour.

"We have to hustle around here in the mornings to get everything sorted, so carriers can get their trucks loaded and get on the road," Robinson said.

Robinson, who joined Duke Postal in 2000, is among 11 members of the sorting team, which won an Auxiliaries teamwork award last year for customer service and troubleshooting.

Each day, the team sorts between 10,000 and 35,000 mail pieces by hand and machine.

A lot of mail from the U.S. Postal trucks goes to Duke Clerk like Carol Hawkins, who loads stacks of first-class letters into a machine. The machine sorts letters for delivery based on buildings and areas. Envelopes fly by, 13 per second, and land in designated bins. Hawkins and other clerks bundle the letters and move them to the sorting station for fine sorting by hand, based on campus box number.

"With the sorting machine, things go pretty smoothly and quickly," Hawkins said. "It's definitely a lot faster than the old days when they sorted all the mail by hand."

Mail Call

Postal clerk Lamont Pearley sorts inter-departmental mail

As an elevator opened on the fourth floor of the Yoh Football Center, mail carrier David Snotherly stepped out, pushing a dolly stacked with several bins of mail.

"Good morning, David," said Frances "Mickey" Laws, an administrative secretary with Duke Football.

"We've got a few things for you." She handed him several letters.

"And I've got some goodies for you, too -- and a piece of priority mail for Coach Cutcliffe," Snotherly said. Soon after, Snotherly handed an envelope to Coach David Cutcliffe.

"I can always tell when you're bringing good news because you're smiling," said Cutcliffe, as he signed a handheld scanner.

Snotherly, an 18-year Duke Postal employee, delivers to a West Campus route that includes athletics departments, the Physics Building and Fuqua School of Business. He's among about a dozen carriers who collect and deliver mail at Duke.

For Snotherly, athletics is typically the busiest portion of his route.

"They usually warn me when they've got a lot of stuff going out, like when they send out basketball media guides," he said, hopping in a van outside Cameron Indoor Stadium. "That way I know to bring a dolly or cart."

No Stamp Needed

As carriers deliver mail on campus, clerks at the warehouse spend the afternoon sorting inter-department campus mail. These are the memos, documents and other work-related correspondence faculty and staff send to each other, typically in Inter-Department Delivery envelopes.

While sorting envelopes, Zenaida Juntilla discovered one inter-department envelope without a proper address. She set it aside, finished sorting campus mail and used the search engine on Duke's website to find the campus box number for the Fuqua professor's name on the envelope.

"We do our best to track down the correct box number," she said, "but things go a lot smoother when people remember to put a box number on all campus mail."

Duke postal carriers collect inter-department campus mail during morning and afternoon routes and take it to the warehouse for sorting and delivery within 24 hours.

"For campus mail from morning routes," said Trogdon, the director of Duke Postal, "we usually manage to deliver it that afternoon."

Postmark: Duke

At the end of the day, postal clerks at the warehouse processed outgoing U.S. mail from campus.

Metering clerk Victor Collins picked up first-class letters and fed them into a metering machine, which snapped up eight envelopes per second, stamping a postmark on each one.

"It's crunch time," Collins said.

He and four clerks processed all outgoing mail, in time for the U.S. Postal Service truck that arrived before 5 p.m. to collect mail and deliver it to Durham's main post office. Collins rolled the last mail cart to the truck at the large bay door. A driver hopped out, and rolled mail carts into the truck.

Debra Bass, Duke Postal's metering supervisor, looked around the warehouse one last time for the day. She flipped off the lights.

"Another good day of work," she said. "And tomorrow we get to do it all over again."