'HAVE A NICE DAY,' said the Las Vegas taxi driver shortly after I arrived in the United States. It was the first time I had actually heard someone use the cliche at the heart of America's much-vaunted service culture, but it came hissed through clenched teeth, and underpinned with a marked tone of sarcasm.
Seconds earlier I had been struggling to open the heavy rear door of the hulking Chevrolet Caprice. When asked if he could kindly free the central locking device, the driver turned down a blaring car radio, calmly turned around and said: 'It is customary to tip in Las Vegas.'
It was only after I produced a couple of dollar bills that the doors suddenly sprang open - showing that nothing beats a little extortion to get your tourist's day off to a good start.
As a relative newcomer, it has been a fascinating experience to test one's prejudices and misconceptions against the realities of life in America at the start of the new millennium. The service culture myth, alas, was one of the first to be shattered. Whenever Asian countries suffer a downturn in tourism, there is a marked tendency to bash themselves over the head about the need to improve the whole service ethic. 'Why can't we be more like America,' is a phrase sometimes heard. Well, America is not all Disneyland.
After five years of travelling professionally around Southeast Asia, I am constantly struck by how well even ordinary service in the region's shops, hotels, cafes and markets compares with that in the United States - notwithstanding the greedy cabbies of Jakarta and Hanoi. A night's stay in a cheap, run-down Laotian family-run guesthouse tends to offer far superior service to a billet in an American chain hotel that costs substantially more.
Don't get me wrong, there is some superb service on offer in the US. More often than not, however, in the Land of the Free you very definitely get what you pay for. In Los Angeles, a more hard-bitten town than most it has to be said, it is not unusual to see diners in restaurants palming over fat tips at the start of the meal to ensure decent service. In Manhattan, where the hipper establishments make a point of turning away anyone who does not fit their target clientele, many top-line joints are, in the words of one local restaurant critic, 'about as welcoming as a guillotine'.
Waiters, working to the strictest of timetables for moving people on, often plonk a bill down halfway through a meal, frequently pulling it from a notebook stored disconcertingly down the back of the trousers. They linger only while the cash is being handed over. Then you will hear the only pleasantries you will receive all evening.