Our friend Grethe is a Dane. For "many thanks," she writes "1000 TAK."
Takes me back to the 70s, when I used to ride the red double-decker London bus (#68, Camden Town to Aldwych). The conductor would punch your ticket and say "tak."
The conductors were "Pakistani" (or so I was told; they were brown-skinned, apparently Asian). But the story was that they had taken the jobs in succession to North Britons--i.e., descendants of the Danish invasions.
Old habits die hard
Friday, October 19, 2007
Tak Tic
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That'd have to be the 70's cause the 68 was one of the first lines in London to get a single decker, door-operated-by-driver, no conductor, ruin-of-london-buses buses. It has been that way since at least 1984. Used to drive me nuts, cause it was the only bus you couldn't get on or off between stops and was my only good route to school. It might be more cost effective to have the driver work the tickets, but it sure made taking the bus a whole lot less convenient. By '89 or '90, they had even banned smoking on the top deck of the doubles. On the bright side, that act made it possible to instantaneously summon a bus by merely lighting your last cigarette at the stop. A bus was always guaranteed to show up and make you put it out inside of 30 seconds.
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