Hairdressers are a Strange Breed

As I was passing through Oamaru yesterday, my only reason for stopping was to check out the screening times for Hitch-Hikers Guide to the Galaxy, as it seemed to be an interesting way to break the journey. Since the next show was not for an hour or so, I decided to wander around to kill some time and just happened to walk past this hairdressers.

I'm not great at going to get haircuts, and so have no formal hairdresser to call my own. I did actually find one when I moved to Dunedin, we had a great conversation about trying to find old friends and stalking them, but by the time I went back for another cut, she'd moved on. The last haircut I had was damn near six months ago at Rodney Wayne's in Hamilton, and most people could not tell I'd had any hair off. Since the world was starting to disappear from my vision, people were starting to think (again) that I'm homeless and one student removed herself from my class because I was too far removed from her expectations of what someone in my position should look like, even I could acknowledge that getting a haircut was becoming an urgent need.

So, I've been looking for a hairdresser for a while. My normal mechanism for finding a one is to peer in the salon window to see what's going on: if they call the police because some scary man is hassling them, I take that as a sign that maybe that's not the place to get a cut. Yesterday, I was smiled at as I peered in: this was such an unusual reaction I had to flee to Smith City's Second Hand Centre for half an hour to gather my wits, but eventually I made my way back. A nice bright salon, lots of orange, timber floor, cool lighting and three women of about 85 lined up under the hair dryers, all being talked to as Mrs Cxxxx or Mrs Gxxxx.

Now everyone knows that guys have no fashion sense - we have metro-sexuals and Queer Eyes for the Straight Guys as proof of that. So, why is it that hairdressers even ask us "what would you like done"? My most undetectable and unsatisfying haircuts have always resulted from me giving precise instructions as to what is to be done, and the very best was the day I simply said to just do what she (I don't really do guy hairdressers) thought best. So, yesterday, I asked for my hair to be shortened to around collar length but when the questions persisted ("do you want it all cut to the same length?"), I left it to her expertise. I thin the outcome is OK: certainly, when I got back home, people were commenting on it, and not in a bad way, so it wasn't another invisible haircut. Oh, and it was a full wash and razor cut, took over half an hour and still only cost $10! Maybe she too thought I was homeless.

Of course, by the time I'd had my hiarcut and my soup at Emma's, the movie had started.