The Malaise Of FOPB!

Living remotely from others leads to a bigger reliance on remotes and their confusing buttons. It is terrifying if you suffer from FOPB…

Taking stock of life as it is now, we realised that there is no way that we can deal with the limited amount of television-based entertainment offered via our usual DSTV bouquet. It is not so much a decision that I made, but rather one that my housemate made…

When we were still free agents with separate and communally quite busy social lives, I used to be fairly happy with just my KykNET soaps, the 7 o’clock news and the late-night political commentary programs. If I missed anything during the week, I simply binge-watched on a Saturday afternoon due to the many repeats, provided that there was no intelligent rugby commentary on the radio, of course.

In our ‘social-mingling’ days, the old man did not want to cough up for the full DSTV bouquet that included all the sport channels, since that would mean he would have no excuse to go out to watch the rugby (and all other sports – even darts!) at the local pub with his mates. This arrangement worked perfectly, since we definitely did not want to be in each other’s company for seven days a week – it would have taken away any passion we may have left. We also have completely different tastes as far as televised entertainment is concerned.

When gloriously home alone, I knew exactly which buttons on which different remotes to press (I wrote it down step-by-step in my dairy) to get the television on, and to find my preferred channels, and that’s all I knew. As long as I could see my usual programmes and my secretly taped copies of Trevor Noah’s shows, I was happy.