ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

You know how sometimes you tell somebody you are getting a haircut and they decide to pretend they don’t know how to speak the English language and they pretend like you meant you were getting a single hair cut, hardy-har-har, and no one ever really thinks it’s funny but them? Well, nobody has done that to me recently, but this post title is for them.

Today I looked through some of the photos I have in iPhoto (since Apple has arranged that in order for a product to be considered for mass production, it must begin with a lowercase i) and I was thinking I would upload some of them to my Flickr account and I found a picture set called “Bad Haircut”, which refers to an incident in February that I had almost forgotten about.

You know what is sad? I had some doubts about the haircut she was giving me, but I did not say anything to her. I thought, well, she’s getting paid for this, so she knows what she is doing. I should have observed the warning signs and said something instead of going home, washing out all the hairspray and realizing that I looked like a total dumbass. This happened at Fairway Styling in Fairway, KS, which is near the Hen House and the BP station, for those of you who know this area.

The first red flag was that when I came in, a screaming child was being physically restrained by his father for his haircut. This would normally be annoying, but no big deal. I thought it was a little weird because the boy looked like he was about 11. So either he had serious emotional and behavioral problems, or he had some kind of developmental disability. I’m not sure which, but it did nothing for the salon atmosphere to listen to a child acting as though serious physical abuse was happening.

The second red flag was that if you’ll look at the second picture, you’ll see that I have extremely straight hair that cannot reliably hold a curl unless it’s the middle of winter and 0% humidity and I use a lot of hairspray. It is customary to wash or at least wet down straight hair before attempting to cut it. You could probably get away with dry cutting curly hair, since it’s much more forgiving of errors, but if straight hair is not cut evenly, it is very obvious.

Their stylist did not even attempt to wet my hair even a little bit. This startled and confused me, and I did not know what to say. So I said nothing. Since, apparently I am an idiot. Also, I have pretty terrible vision so I did not realize that she was not layering my hair as I had requested. I did notice that she had taken off about 2 more inches than I requested, but she did a bunch of styling things to it and it looked pretty nice when I left. When I got home, I was standing in front of the mirror when I noticed a chunk of my hair hanging down about an inch lower than the rest of it. Puzzled, I looked more closely and realized that not only had she not done layers, her blunt cut was incredibly not straight. For some reason I couldn’t get a good picture of this, but at least it is pretty obvious how bad it was.

I was completely horrified. I hopped in the shower and after I had washed all her styling gunk out of my hair, it was very awful indeed. I had a pair of haircutting scissors that I use to trim the dog’s beard when I clean her up, so I wiped them on a paper towel and began to cut my own hair. Not only were the individual sides uneven in their own right, the two sides were not the same length. I cut the longer side to match the short side. It made me want to go back to her salon and request that she pay me $30 for wasting my time to begin with and then for cutting my hair so badly that I had to cut my own hair in the mirror. See that expression? It says, “I paid someone $22 to butcher my hair and I am annoyed but not angry enough to actually go back and have a fit about it, also, I have already fixed it by now with my dog scissors and it’s not like I want them to try to do anything else to it, so instead I will be passive aggressive and tell everyone I have ever met to avoid Fairway Styling off Shawnee Mission Parkway & Belinder Road.” I spent a couple of weeks trying to destroy their customer base and then I sort of forgot about it for a while. But finding these pictures brought it all back.