Tentatively Tasmanian

It is weird to say that you’re in love with a bus system? Stuff it: I’m in love with MetroTas.

Buses turn up every ten minutes where we’re currently located in Moonah and it was easy to buy a green credit card thingy from their office in Elizabeth Street, run by fifty-something ladies who all had a cheeky glint in their eye. The lady dealing with us clucked when the receipt machine stopped working. “It’s Sharon’s day off. She always knows how to fix this.”

“Here you go darlin,” the customer service attendant, let’s call her Maureen, said to my husband Craig as he loaded $50 onto his card.

“And here’s yours, sweetheart,” she said to me, smiling. “You just enter the front of the bus, tap it on the ticket reader by the driver and it’ll take two bucks eighty out of your account and away you go.”

We both left, beaming, still astonished at how friendly Hobartians are. Or those in customer services roles at least.

In Geneva, any form of customer service role seemed to be occupied by people who were depressed, hated all forms of human contact and were extremely reluctant to offer any form of assistance. The supermarkets in particular. It always felt like they pressed their conveyor belt to Mach 3 speed when I rolled up with a full nanna cart. One time a carton of eggs whizzed by before I could grab it and ended up in a cracked, sticky mess on the floor.

“Je suis desolee,” I said, trying to make eye contact with the check-out chick. Or ‘Extremely Annoyed Matron’ to be more precise.

Just why I was apologising to her was not understood but an automatic reaction. She stopped the conveyor belt, rolled her eyes and spoke in indecipherable but weary French into her microphone and an even more miserable person schlumped over with a mop and bucket to clean it up. My shy smile of gratitude at him was returned with a glare that instantly withered my internal organs.

I understood enough French, as well as her angry gesture towards the back of the supermarket, that she would wait, very impatiently, while I ran back to get a replacement carton of eggs, red-faced in shame, and whilst not dare forgetting to sincerely apologise to all the customers in line behind me.

Once returned, the belt restarted at a blurry speed, but my arms were better at scooping and packing, scooping and packing, scooping and packing. The check out matron’s arms were firmly by her side, as if fused; pulled down by invisible magnets in her sleeves or via gravitational forces. Maybe CERN was to blame. No matter, it was made very clear without movement or speech that there was NO WAY she was going to help me move stuff along, even when we could both hear a few French-Suisse ‘tuts’ of disapproval behind me while I wasted everyone’s valuable time.

One of her arms eventually extended itself to take my credit card, but she was determined not to meet my glance or make any extra or unnecessary movements other than receive payment.

Over the next twelve years, I became used to this and my scooping and packing skills became not only swift, but rather skilful. Experience taught me never to smile or attempt small talk either in my broken French, or in English if the service provider was young enough to have learned it at school. No, I was an annoyance: their lives would be infinitely better if there weren’t such abominations as customers to ruin their days.

But here in Hobart, I’ve been darling-ed, sweetie-ed and how-ya-goin’-ed during my errand running, finding a car park, reapplying for stuff such as Medicare cards, converting our drivers’ licences, bank stuff, grocery shopping, searching for coffee and eating lunch.

The bus is like a lovely exclamation point to all this niceness, kindness and enthusiasm. I’ve noticed that everyone greets the bus driver as they tap their tickets. Everyone. Toothless bogans with beers for breakfast, old ladies, high school students, intense young hipsters, busy parents and that strange breed of men who wear shorts during the cold winter.

Even better, as they get off at their designated stop, they leave through the middle door and every single person calls out a loud “thank you!” to the driver as they sproing off the step into the street.

It makes me smile every time I hear it.