It wasn't the money spent I resented, it was the time wasted...

Cycling S and I drove into a deserted Civic yesterday (I hadn't realised the Canberra Centre and pretty much everywhere else would be closed on New Year's Day!) and lined up to buy our tickets to Benjamin Button. Even with Cycling S's Club Dendy membership card the tickets still cost $10 each which was a still bit of a shock after ANU Film Group last year, where I got the cost per movie down to $3.

Then we wandered round for a while until we found a place that was open for lunch and that wasn't Ali Baba or a bakery full of revheads in town for Summernats (it was New Year's Day! We wanted a little better than that!) An entree, main and glass of wine set us back $44 each. It was New Year's Day. It was OK. The bill would have been more if our waiter had actually managed to come back and check to see if we wanted dessert (the coconut and ginger ice cream looked very tempting)

With still almost an hour to go before the movie we wandered over to see if CMAG was open so we could have tea and biscuits in the members' lounge and do nice things for their stats (no luck) then discovered that Academic Remainders was open and spent some time browsing (but not buying) there.

Back at the cinema my patience started fraying as we stood in line for choc tops (yes, I know we didn't need them but we were at the movies and it was all part of the experience. Especially since, as I suspected, they had maple and walnut icecream choc tops!) They cost $3.20 which I didn't think was too bad at all.

Then we were called to line up in the corridor leading to the cinemas. Were we stayed for 20 minutes. Then, when we were finally allowed into the cinema (choc tops long gone) we had to sit through another 20 minutes worth of really bad ads and trailers for other movies before finally getting to see the movie we paid for.

As we drove home I tried to work out the following equation:

If I pay $10 per movie at a real cinema and waste 40 minutes of my life queueing and being bombarded with advertising...

Compared to $3 per movie at ANU Film Group (thus saving the 40 minutes worth of wasted time) how do I work out the cost per hour of my time saved?