Higher standard of living OR paying more and more

Recently, there has been an increase in cab fare because apparently, the fuel has gone up so bad, they need to cover costs. There has been an increase in bus fare, for the same lame reason. Flour prices have gone up. Egg prices have gone up. Sugar prices have gone up. Therefore hawker food and coffee prices (at hawker centres in general) have gone up too.

Just a few days back, SISTIC, one of the ticketing companies that sells tickets for performances and such, increased its administrative charges. When it first introduced this administrative charge, many members of the public had already made lots of noise. They did not see the need to pay extra, but with all things here in this sunny island of Singapore. All things will go ahead as planned.

This is how it works. If you buy a ticket that is $20 and below, you will only need to pay $1 administrative charge on top of your ticket price. Anything that is above that would have an administrative charge of $2 tagged to the ticket prices.Now, instead of $2 SISTIC is going to charge $3.

It may not seem like a lot to some, but small things do add up. If I watched 10 performances in a year, it will be $10 more that I will have to fork out. Let's say I pay $3 for each meal, $10 can feed me for a day.

I am very upset as I am a lover of the arts and I try to support it as much as I can. The government did say that it wanted to make the arts more accessible and get more of its people to appreciate it. This is just not the way. What sort of an administrative charge is there, when we need to collect the tickets on our own from the counter (even that has a $0.20 charge!) and the Internet system is so slow that you may not get your desired seats simply because the browsing period expired.

I think the cheaper alternative would be to stay at home to watch t.v. programmes. Better yet, read a book. In that way, I only need to pay for energy usage for the lights.

I don't mean to sound like a complainer. I don't think there is much use in complaining. It will fall on deaf ears anyway (which is why I have not bothered to write to the Forum page in Straits Times). I will just bitch about here and get on with life.