I love Britishers. or, non-specific Englishmen.

From the BBC:

The mechanics of tipping US-style

By: Kevin Connolly, BBC Correspondent

Paying something extra to the person who has provided you with a service is common in the US, but working out who gets a tip and how much can be confusing, as Kevin Connolly reveals.

Hi. My name is Kevin and I am going to be your reporter today.

I will be offering you a very long extended metaphor. How would you like that - well done, or really, really overdone?

While you are choosing, maybe I could bring you some adjectives - rhadamanthine, mellifluous, torpid, porcine. We have got them all.

And if, when our business is done and I have brought you a couple of adverbs speedily and obligingly, you feel moved to leave me some small financial consideration then we will both be richer.

I will actually be richer, and you will have been given, well, the opportunity to give.

Now, I know you have already paid me to write this, but this is not about the overall deal. It is about you and me and the relationship we have been building up over the last 45 seconds.

Do you not remember those adjectives?

Superior service

The world really starts to look like a different place when you spend a few months exposed to the world of American service with the laser-beam intensity of its hurried charm.

Americans think it is the most natural thing in the world to pay for a service, at the point where you receive it, person-to-person.

First, they reason, it keeps whoever is doing the serving on their toes.

Your French Toast will be Frencher, your upside-down cake more comprehensively inverted when someone knows their income depends on it.

There is something in that, by the way. I have waited half an hour for a receipt in communist Poland while watching two young waiters playing football with a polystyrene cup.

And it is widely recognised that most people working in the service industries in America are underpaid by their employer on the assumption that you will be taking up the slack when it comes to tip time.

Whenever I object that this system means that almost every transaction you undertake in America is booby-trapped with social awkwardness, I am shouted down.

'Kind of journey'

Everyone knows, I am assured, the scale of charges.

A dollar for a doorman, $2 (£1.40) for a shoe-shine or a taxi-driver, double the sales tax for a server in a cafe, $1 for a drink in a bar, 20% in a full-service restaurant and so on.

But there is of course very little logic to the whole business of who we tip and who we do not.

Obviously, no-one slips their heart surgeon or airline pilot something a little extra at the end of an operation or a flight, because they earn too much for that to make sense. But why tip a waiter and not a shop assistant?

Or the driver of a taxi, but not the driver of a bus?

It is probably because historically there were certain transactions only open to the rich, including having your hair cut by someone who was not a blood relation and going to a restaurant.

And if it were as simple as that, I would be happy enough, but of course it is not.

Any server worth their salt is going to try to persuade you that the two of you have been on a kind of journey together through your meal which can only be properly consummated with cash.

Sometimes if you are British this will begin with a moment of awkwardness.

A young man in Jackson, Mississippi, once recognised my accent: "Like the Beatles, right?" he said and asked nervously if I knew about "the tipping thing".

I confirmed that rumours of it had reached our side of the Atlantic, but had been received with widespread disbelief.

Often a server will squat on their haunches to give them eye contact as they would with a recalcitrant toddler and then act as though you are co-conspirators in a plot to give you a heart attack: "Have we saved room for dessert?"

It is not confined to the restaurant trade either. I know a hotel in Manhattan which employs a team of doormen to get your cases from taxi to lobby.

They work in the manner of medieval peasants passing buckets of water from hand to hand to fight a fire. The idea is that you are meant to tip each of them, although of course it would be cheaper to buy new suitcases and clothes after checking in.

Avoiding disfavour

And to me there is something un-American at the heart of the whole idea of tipping.

Think back to the restaurant. It does not take any more effort or skill to serve a $10 bottle of wine than it does to serve one that costs 100. Multiplying the service charge by 10 is a kind of a private, self-imposed wealth tax, rather than a tip.

And yet somehow when the bill appears, most of us, most of the time, do add that little something, or indeed that rather substantial something, all to avoid the fleeting disfavour of someone whose professional charm has passed briefly over us like intermittent illumination from a distant lighthouse.

Not me of course.

I really feel we have been on a journey together here and I hope you do too.

So if there is no other part of speech I can bring you, a last thought-provoking compound adjective for instance, I will leave you.

You have an outstanding day now!