I went for a coffee break just now, and discovered a little, oft-forgotten quirk in our coffee shops.
As I was preparing to pay for my kopi-o, I wasn’t sure if the price had gone up from 50c to 60c or 60c to 70c, so I laid my coins out on the table for the auntie to collect.
She told me it was only 60c, and then asked, ‘ä½ æœ‰ shilling å•Š?‘， pointing at the coins on the table, and asking, “can change shilling for me?”
What she meant was, she wanted to give me a $2 note in exchange for the two $1 coins I had on the table.
Fair exchange, I thought, but it struck me strange that so many decades after we’ve stopped being a British colony, and even more decades since the British started using decimal denomination in their oddly named currency, the coffee shop auntie still refers to small change as ‘shillings’.
Podcast: the mrbrown show 1 May 2006: the persistently non-political podcast no. 6
(MP3, Filesize: 1.5mb, Time: 00:02:58)
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