In Reply to: Pretending to be French to avoid the train fare. posted by Damien. on November 17, 2002 at 08:32:16:
Damien,
Glad to hear that others have this habit too! I thought that I was the only nutter :) who uses their language skills to this advantage. In my case it's usually in a very strong German dialect "Ich speak kein English, Ich understand nicht". On a few occasions I have put on a brillian Russian accent too, which really works, since the chances of a ticket inspectors speaking Russian are quite slim. I travel on South-West trains every day and have got away with not paying their rip-off fare quite a few times. There have been times when I have come close to trouble. I sat with my mates and spoke to them in fluent English, when the ticket inspector arrived all the sudden my English is replaced by a very strong German accent-- I did receive funny and annoyed looks from other passengers. Once a guy actually started shouting "give them a fine, they're fake"! But I must have been so convincing that the inspector just shrugged his shoulders and walked off...
And I have tried this in Germany with an English accent and it also worked (but I had to buy a ticket, got no fine though!). So why pay if you can get away with it? As long as SW trains don't start recruiting multilingual staff, I should be safe until I get a job with better pay and can actually afford the £150/month travelcard!