My First Day

There aren't any pictures to share, which is just as well, 'cause I'd prolly get sued. Today was my first day on the floor flying solo cutting hair (well, not really as there is always an instructor within earshot in case I get in over my head). I was scheduled to do a perm this morning, but that got bumped so I could make up some things we didn't get to during my "class" period. So I got a haircut this afternoon. A simple little haircut...if I had foresight, I would never have crawled out of bed.

The woman who came in was an older lady who kept her hair fairly short, for lack of a better term, somewhat "mannish". She had tried to cut her hair herself (a definite no no) and miscalculated badly. So she came in to have it fixed. It started out well enough, with a shampoo and some conditioner. Then everything went downhill. For some reason that I'm still unable to fathom, I went into a total brain lock. This woman was telling me all the things that she wanted done and I kept combing her hair back, thinking "what in the hell am I supposed to do first?" (calling an instructor over before I even cut one strand of hair would have been a definite faux pas). Finally, I had foot dragged enough so I went to work. Backwards. Have you ever seen someone try put on their clothes in the reverse order? Y'know, like pants first, then underwear? That was me. I was cutting things first that I should have done last, totally flying by the seat of my pants. After about 15 minutes, my brain came out of whatever fugue state it was in and I realized what I was doing. Fortunately, I hadn't done permanent damage, at least anything that wasn't fixable. Still, even though when I was finished this woman had a really good haircut, she wasn't happy because the hair in the back of her head was too long. Now, she told me to leave it longer because she had a cow lick and she didn't want it to stand up in the back and even after she got a good look at it in the mirror and saw that it was fine, she was still miffed.

Chrystal, who sits beside me, told me afterward that I was trembling just a bit while I was cutting her hair. Brandi commented that she can now tell when I'm nervous because I talk really fast and ramble quite a bit (and that is very true...when I'm uncomfortable, I tend to get verbose...the higher the discomfort, the more words spill out of my mouth...get me so nervous I could pee and I'll give you a discourse on Stephen Hawking's quantum physics theories complete with digressions on black holes and anti-matter). I do have to say that while the experience was just a bit on the nerve wracking side, I'm glad it's over so I can move on. Which I did about 20 minutes later...

The second haircut of the day proved to be much less stressful. The woman complained that her hair stood out below her cap ("sprouted wings" was her phrase) and since she wears a hat quite a bit, she wanted something done to fix it. She had actually used some clippers on her hair earlier in the day to try and correct the problem but it only made things worse (PEOPLE, PLEASE!!! Don't try this at home!). Fortunately, I was much more relaxed this go-round and she was pleased with her result, so much so that I got a tip! Yay, drinks are on me! (as long as it's happy hour and the prices are like $0.05 a glass...due to scheduling with watching the kids and Heather's job, I'm not working while I'm in school so we're a bit poor at the moment). I've got a perm scheduled first thing out of the gate tomorrow so we'll see how that goes (perms can be deadly as far as hair is concerned...all those tales of people losing their hair after a perm are not just urban legends).