I have made a mistake.

Two years ago in February, I signed up to pay television. As I wasn’t working at the time and had no idea how long I’d be out of work, I picked only the ‘necessary’ channels eg. news, a couple of English speaking television stations that seemed to have most of our favourite shows (AXN, Star World, BBC). I also like nature shows so I subscribed to the National Geographic Series too.

Conveniently, asking for broadband at the same time meant that we could have five channels for free. The provider looks after the phones, television and whatever else they possibly can. It’s a duopoly.

As our contract was for two years, the salespeople came to negotiate a new deal for us. There is no way we could possibly watch that much television to make there initial offer worthwhile. We were being offered all the English speaking channels for HKD288 per month. I have no idea how many channels that is but it’s at least 50 (or that’s how it looks when all the channels are written on the contract in small print).

The salespeople were somewhat surprised when we said that many channels were not required as apparently everyone else in our street has all of these stations. It was at this moment I found myself thinking “well, if everyone else in the street jumps off a bridge / into a fire, doesn’t mean that I have to” followed quickly by “I can’t believe how fast that popped into my head. Thanks Mum, Granny and Dad”. This was then followed by “that’s probably because most of these families have children, a helper and one parent staying at home so they could possibly watch enough tv to make it worthwhile” followed by “that’s a bit presumptuous” and then “I’d better pay attention now to what they’re saying”.

We decided to buy a few movie stations as often there’s no movies on when we would like to watch them, there’s no dvd store nearby and the free to air stations are not received in this area. We were also able to buy a few new stations as the prices had dropped since our initial purchase.

That was the mistake.

I am now thankful that I didn’t jump off the bridge / into the fire, as I think we’ve already justified the cost for this month. However, come the heat and humidity of summer, I’ll probably be kicking myself that I don’t have 50 channels to scroll through and still find nothing that I really want to watch in the cool comfort of the living room.

* Thanks to The Disposable Heroes of Hypocrisy for the title to this post.