It's been two years since officialdom called for an overhaul of the dismal service culture in Singapore and recent brushes with sub-standard service convince me that  standards remain languishing in the cesspit.

Throw in some ungraciousness by various protagonists and you have a recipe for hypertension...

Recent experience no.1: I present myself at a service counter of a reputable electronics store -- the kind that has an outlet at every mall and which you'd expect to have better trained staff -- and enquire for a certain camera. The assistant gives me that frowning look as though his home has just been repossessed and I have come as the bank's agent to demand the balance he still owes. He then utters an unenthusiastic "No stock." -- not a word more, not a word less, and certainly no effort in expounding on whether there will ever be stock, when it would arrive, or whether I'd be interested in other comparable models. Okay I thought, he may not have had the obligation to engage me in banal banter (nothwithstanding that I was the only one at his counter), but couldn't he at least have displayed a more pleasant countenance?

Recent experience no.2: Undaunted, I persist in my mission, duly presenting myself at a competitor one floor up. They're busier, so I wait with patience and understanding. I get served after 10 minutes by a relatively more pleasant assistant who produces the camera I want. Being a novice in such gadgets (my last camera being an entry-level device that came bundled with insurance I bought a good 8 years ago), I request a run-down on its seemingly intimidating array of knobs, buttons and dials. The assistant obliges and begins expatiating on shutter speeds, aperture sizes, pixels and more pixels at break-neck speed. The more I listened, the more I was convinced he was from another planet, and the gadget at hand some space-age accoutrement that helped navigate his passage to Earth.

Just when I realise I was not getting any wiser on the subject, he turns his attention to an interjecting bitch of a fellow customer to my side who cannot wait her turn and rudely interrupts the presentation with a query on a wholly unrelated gadget (...one that would plug some orifice of hers, I hypothesized...). Chagrined, I glare at her with a castigating "Hey, can't you see he's attending to me? Wait your turn...". The bitch persists in her quest, challenging my rebuke with gibberish I deemed unworthy of the attention of my weary brain cells, already strained from the bombardment of technical jargon I had just been subjected to. Seeking to calm tensions, the assistant duly summons a colleague to render her assistance and returns his attention to me, by which time, I had lost interest in my mission.

Recent experience no.3: I am at a hawkers' centre queueing to buy roti prata for breakfast and am next in line to be served when an auntie-like middle-aged bitch surreptitiously sneaks in from the side and brazenly squeezes in her order to the elderly stall assistant, who, oblivious that others are already waiting in line, entertains her! Exasperated, I tap the assistant on the shoulder to explain to him the purpose of my very presence thereat (which was certainly not to scrutinize his derrier) only to be chastised for not bringing my order to his attention earlier! And there I was thinking I'd give the poor old man some breathing space by not rushing my order to him ... sigh! Well, the consolation from that unhappy exchange was that he attended to me first. What a way to start the day...