Have you ever felt a bit chilly at the cinema? How about on a bus? Do you keep a jacket in the office at all times? There's a good chance you've answered 'yes' to all three questions because Hong Kong is notorious for being too reliant on air conditioning all year round. And it's giving the city a bad reputation.
Popular travel guide Lonely Planet warns visitors in its latest edition that: '[Hong Kong's indoor] temperatures are set so low you may find your extremities turning blue.'
Research by WWF Hong Kong, meanwhile, found that air conditioning usage comprises 27 per cent of all electricity usage in the city, and that figure jumps to a whopping 60 per cent in the summer. In fact, indoor temperatures in Hong Kong are among the lowest in the world. The conservation group also says that if everyone in the world lived like a Hongkonger, we'd need 2.2 earths to survive.
But there's a bigger issue at stake than Hongkongers getting the sniffles - the Observatory says that the city's high use of electricity is accelerating global warming. Temperatures in the city are rising at 0.6 degrees Celsius per decade, more than three times the global average. Will this mean even more ferocious use of the air conditioner?
Many residents agree that the city's air conditioners are set too low. Online complaints about low indoor temperatures can be found on popular online forums in both Chinese (uwants.com) and English (geoexpat.com, asiaxpat.com), and seemingly every environmental group in the city, from Friends of the Earth to Green Sense, strongly disapproves of the excessive usage.
'It's one thing to have cold air blasting during the summer,' says Cyrus Lo Sai-man, an irate resident. 'But Hong Kong buses had cold air coming out of the vents even in December. It is absolutely stupid and makes me angry.'
Lo's opinion is shared by many Hongkongers - plenty of office workers admit to having a jacket specifically for office use, especially in summer when air conditioners are turned up to the max.