And how are you enjoying your column today? I trust it is holding your interest, and passing the time pleasantly. . . .

Sorry. But I have been brooding on the tendency of certain professions to seek immediate praise and feedback. The other day, I went to a department store, selected a variety of socks and tracked down a clerk to pay for them. The transaction was unextraordinary, until he handed me the bag.

“Neil, I hope you had excellent service today,” said the clerk. “My name is Andy.”

I paused, wondering what I was supposed to do with that information.

Why was he confessing his hopes and telling me his name? Was I supposed to convey to his superiors what a fine job Andy had done selling me socks? I ended up muttering, “Yes Andy, very good service, thank you,” as I fled, but had I been honest, I would have said, “Well, up until the strange, overly intimate business at the end, everything was in order.”

I’ve noticed an overzealousness lately among service workers. Perhaps they’re so damn happy to have a job, or maybe standards have slid so much that anyone doing a halfway competent task feels justified in demanding praise on the spot.

I was sitting with my brother at a fancy Chicago restaurant — I won’t say which one, because I go there often and don’t want to foul the nest. The waiter, Danny, brought our after-lunch coffee.

“Are you left- or right-handed?” he asked me brightly.

“Umm, left-handed,” I said.

He grandly set the coffee cup down with the handle turned to the left and stepped back, admiring his handiwork, beaming at me expectantly, like a child who has just handed his father an ashtray made out of coils of clay.

For an instant, it seemed like superlative service — now I would not have to go through the bother of turning the cup, or the hazard of lifting it with my less-nimble right hand. Our waiter certainly seemed to think that this was the gold-plated treatment.

But after he bustled off, glowing, as my brother and I sat there and sipped, something seemed wrong, and I groped to put my finger on it. My brother, being brighter than myself, summed it up precisely.

If a waiter, he said, was going to concern himself with which way the coffee cup handle pointed, then the thing to do would be not to quiz the patron, which is intrusive, but to notice what hand he holds his fork with, and set the cup facing that direction without drawing attention to it.

Indeed, I said, adding that the tip-off that this was not good, but bad service is the fact that in all my years of restaurant going, no waiter had ever done it before. Things that have not happened before usually haven’t happened for a good reason.

Have PoliticalMavens.com delivered to your inbox in a daily digest by clicking here