[Ace]

Coming from the US, I'm used to junk mail. However, NZ seems to have a few twists that I don't quite understand:

-- Most home mailboxes have a "no circulars" sign on them. Does that really do any good? I have one, and still get all sorts of junk in my mailbox.

-- I regularly see young kids (maybe 12 yrs old) walking around stuffing junk in people's mailboxes. First, I'm surprised kids that young are allowed to work (not so in the US), and second, I'm surprised anyone other than the postal service is allowed to put things in my mailbox (only the post office in the US is legally allowed to put anything in people's mailboxes). Neither is necessarily a bad thing; just one of those things that takes a little getting used to.

-- Every once in a while, someone will drop a catalog of some kind at my front door, with a note on it that says something like "please read this. I'll come by in a few days to pick it up." In the US, such a note would be totally ignored, and the junk would be immediately thrown away by 99% of the people who receive it -- so of course that's what I did when I first got one. When the woman came by to pick it up (I was shocked that she actually did what the note on the catalog said she would do), she was horrified that I had thrown the catalog away. She asked where it was, and when I said it was buried in the rubbish bin, she actually asked me if I would be willing to go get it. I declined, but the whole thing made me feel like I did something wrong....

-- In the US I was used to being able to leave mail in my mailbox, and have it picked up by a postal worker, instead of having to take it to the post office or to a public mailbox. Almost all mailboxes have a flag on them that can be raised to indicate that something is waiting for pickup. My mailbox here doesn't have a flag, nor do most that I see, although I have seen one or two with flags. If I don't have a flag, can I still leave mail in my mailbox to be picked up?