Wh-….WHAT THE HELL, GAIA?!

regeneratethis:

anotherjourneybytrain:

regeneratethis:

gentleman-jim:

kriegspeil:

obstinate-condolement:

whatbritainloves:

Britain Loves to HelpSaying thanks to the bus driver

“Cheers, mate”, “Thanks, driver”, “Thank you”, “Nice one, pal”. It’s what you’ll hear on buses throughout Britain as, one-by-one, we shuffle out onto the street. Thanking the bus driver is a beautiful quirk of us Brits; a mundane politeness which makes the world a little nicer. 

What makes thanking bus drivers so great is that there’s really no need for it. It’s not like you’re touching down after a long-haul flight where your life has been in the hands of an expert pilot. It’s a bus (as pictured above by David Henderson); you’ve only been driven 10 minutes down the road.

And it’s not like we ever run to the front of a train, bang on the driver’s window and start giving them a big thumbs-up. No, this is something unique to the world of bus travel.

That’s the beauty of this particular ritual. It’s a totally mindless and senseless form of niceness. We don’t even expect anything in return. We realise the bus driver has to cope with hundreds and hundreds of us mumbling thanks to them every day.

Just about the only thing the bus driver can do to stop us from thanking them is braking too hard, nobody likes that, or being aggressively rude. A little bit of rudeness is perfectly acceptable.

It’s a tradition that has developed its own regional quirks. The Bristolians, in particular, have made it their own with their distinctive use of the phrase “Cheers, drive”. Dropping the ‘r’ from driver has become a major source of local pride for them with museum exhibitions named after the phrase and t-shirts emblazoned with it.

One of the few places in Britain where the bus driver thanking tradition has fallen out of common usage is London. They try to make excuses for this; they say it’s the design of London buses with the exit in the middle so you don’t pass the driver on the way out. Yes, it could be that. It’s possible. Or it could just be that they’re misery guts.

By Tom Law

I always thought saying thank you to the bus driver was an Irish thing. Our little islands are just next door to each other, I suppose.

this was one of the things that surprised me when I moved here, but I quickly got used to it and it’s quite lovely. now I gotta unlearn that habit when I move back to Sweden though!

NOT IN LONDON WE DON’T

rude shits of the uk UNITE

As a Geordie I always say thanks :D Because the drivers up here are nice enough to smile back and give you change.

Unlike the drivers in Preston >:U but they’re polite enough to get a thank you.

But as I go further South it’s a habit I drop lol.

Pretty sure I’ve reblogged this, but… Aff! Why?! We say thank you here in the South East.

Because the bus drivers get moodier and angrier the further South I get ;;

You must just randomly have a lot of happy drivers ahahaha!

Wha-? Ok, I’m confused because almost everyone does that here in Michigan. I thought it was something polite that everyone did.

The better question is “There are places where you don’t thank the driver or give them a pleasant greeting?” o__0

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