Me: 1, Uni: 0

Okay, my title is misleading. I don't know that I've actually won something, but I feel victorious. :) We get heaps and heaps of junk mail. By 'we', I mean students as well as Kiwis. I think there's a law in the States against people just walking around and putting crap in people's mailboxes. That law does not exist here. Let's just say, for example, that I wanted to stuff every person's mailbox in the city with a flyer that said, "Annika rules". Because, well, I do. I could do that as long as I'm keen to walk all over the city to do so. This means tons of flyers telling me that evening's drink specials at approximately ten bars, pizza deals, flyers for every store in town and political newsletters that I don't care about. That's just your average pile of mail. I hate this kind of mail. I did not sign up to hear your daily drink specials, I am not a communist/socialist/green party/lefty/righty politically obsessed person. I can't vote here, so I don't care. And if you knew I was an American, I bet you'd keep your politics as far from me as possible. I don't want to order your dumb pizza, I don't care how much your new plasma TVs are on sale - I can't afford it. I don't want an advert for the hardware store; I own a hammer and nails, what else could I possibly need? And Green party, why oh why are you printing out mass quantities of paper ads that people just throw out without recycling (I don't just on principle there)?

My retaliation is simple. If I get any kind of mail that doesn't have my name or address on it, I throw it in a bin that is next to my front door. It isn't actually my bin, so it must be the University's. It is actually for mulching, I think, because the uni's gardening staff use it for leaves, branches and grass. They clean it out every two weeks and it has their mulch and my two weeks' worth of ads. This has gone on since the first week I arrived here in Sunny Dunedin.

This week, they took away my bin.

Now, I can see that this might not be considered a victory. Even if it is a victory, I don't know that I won over the university. But, I feel like it is. Because someone else was irritated by the rubbish too. I mean, technically, they couldn't ever prove it was me because there isn't any identification on the mail - hence the problem. Now, it's not just an issue of my annoyance. Is that a victory? I don't know, but I'll take it.