Calculated Risk

It can be hard to know sometimes whether one should take the cheap option or the more expensive one. I found recently that the pasta sauce I liked had become more expensive, and so I went with one a bit cheaper, only to find that I couldn't stomach the drop in quality. I will just have to suck it up and pay on that front, but there are other areas where it works out better to take a chance on cutting corners.

A good example is a pole dancing competition I went to recently. I was eager to go, but not so eager to spend the money on a good seat. The options seemed to be standing room, the seats right in front of that, tables and booths. It developed that my friends had those seats, which were the next step up from standing room. The tables and booths were seemingly the highest in price. I decided to take a chance on standing room.

Standing room can be all right provided the sight lines are good and one is not perpetually in the way of people and venue staff. That does happen. In this case, those things were not a problem. It was a fine venue in every respect (outside of the neighborhood it was in). Of course, I needn't have worried anyway about whether the place was good for standing, as the event failed to sold out and the staff was kind enough not to make an issue of people "moving down".

Moving down was a traditional move in the later innings of baseball games I attended as a boy. These were minor league and spring training games, you understand. The expensive tickets were not even a consideration, but those seats became possible when it was evident that no one had bought the tickets for them, and you only knew that later in the game. For this pole competition, I took a chance and it paid off.