German 4 Dummies: "Service"

If your gut reaction is "they don't have it", one of two reasons will apply.

1) You are really old, like 40+ years, and vividly remember the time when you walked into a German store and were greeted with a grumpy 'what do you want' in response to your cheerful "Good morning", "Good afternoon".

2) You have dealt with the English-language lookalike "Service", which is mostly used by corporations and government or semi-government agencies too lazy to provide an 800 number or even a regular number. Instead, they use Premium numbers, making you pay for their 'service'.

3) Tennis became a German sport.
You noticed we said two and went to three? Good for you, now apply that in real life.

The good old German term for customer service or other service industry offerings would be "Dienst". Dienst has the root in to serve (dienen) and is as old-fashioned as the "ich dien" on English coins of yore.

Yes, despite not one but two bloody wars in the 20th century, English coins said "ich dien", what a committment.

In the German language, some vestiges of "Dienst" remain, many out of administrative inertia, like the Bundesnachrichtendienst, their foreign intelligence service. Small family owned companies also still use Kundendienst instead of Kunden-Service.

How did Dienst get replaced by Service?
It sounded cool, no more of the servant connotation despite the roots of the English. It was the perfect facade for downgrading the actual level of service from okay-ish to crap. Sure, blame the bankers, too - they wanted to justify their expensive fees by claiming they offered banking services instead of a place where you put your money and got a loan.

German Service comes as a male noun "der Service", despite the fact that most of the providers to this day are female.

There is also a grammatically neutral version "das Service". Which is a set of dishes or tableware. Plates, cups, the like.

Which can make for interesting sentences.

Das Service ist gestoppt.

The service is stopped.

Tableware generally does not need to be stopped, as it does not run in the first place. The only occasion TheEditor can think of where a set of dishes is stopped, well that would be in a domestic dispute with serious hurling of plates. Any wall or body part between the thrower and a wall would stop "das Service".

Das Service ist gestoppt was a translation error. The service in question was a computer operating system service.

Now, what is the plural of "Service"? If you mean the plural of the form "der Service", then you get the anglicized "die Services".

For sets of dishes, you would prefer the form "die Service". Where the "e" at the end does double duty as the regular e and the German plural "e", sort of.

Oh, you are Austrian? Just use "das", nobody will mind.

The above is all hunky dory but there is a possible pitfall in everyday spoken communication.

In large swaths of southern Germany, a perfect strange may pass you and utter a single word that sounds like "service".

You must not act surprised or puzzled. The stranger is not soliciting anything!

The stranger is not saying "Service" but "Servus", which is just a friendly hello. All it needs to confuse the two is careless pronunciation meeting an untrained ear, and severe miscommunication can occur.

We do not know how wise it would be to take a print-out of this post to your German Ausländerbehörde to show you are making an honest effort to learn the language.