very simple

I usually try to keep my ranting to fairly serious, political-type stuff, but right now I’m taking a little break to have a totally girly rant.

Background: One of my best friends from law school is getting married next week. As such, I decided to hold off on getting my hair cut and colored until today, so that it would be super-cute for the wedding. Last night, before going out for the evening, I checked my voicemail and my appointment was confirmed. Great. So I go out.

I get home at 1 in the morning, to another voicemail, this time from my distraught stylist, saying that at the end of the day, she had been "let go" for not bringing in enough business and wouldn’t be able to cut my hair today.

Yeah, they fired her for not having business after confirming my appointment for a 3-hour, $200+ haircut. Nice, huh? (and it’s not the cut, it’s the color that costs the big bucks and takes so much time). At this point, I have received no call from the salon. So I call and leave a message for the salon, explaining that I have to get my hair cut for this wedding, and to please contact me by 9 a.m. to let me know what they’re going to do to make this right for me, because right now I’ve got something fast approaching a mullet due to the fact that I let it grow out for an extra month specifically because I wanted to wait until right before the wedding for the cut.

9a.m. rolls around, and no call. At 9:30a.m., I call again and get the receptionist, and ask her what the hell is going on – do I still have an appointment? Were they planning on just letting me walk in there at 11 and telling me that there was no one to cut my hair? I have a wedding to go to and now I have to go to someone who has never cut or colored my hair before? She assures me that they’ll take care of me, they have excellent people and will do whatever I need.

Mind you, I also find a really good picture of me from a day right after I got my hair cut previously, and bring it with me, just to show exactly what I want.

So I go for my appointment. At this point I’m just not very happy. They set me up with the colorist, who doesn’t pay attention to any of my instructions and highlights my hair to a really terrible uniform yellow-orange-gold, instead of chunky white-blond. I, of course, can’t tell this until my hair begins to dry halfway through the cut. Aaah, the cut…

They set me up with this stylist who turns out to be an "exchange student" from japan, who does not speak english. Now, I’m all for cross-cultural studies and what-not, but don’t you think that after you (1) fire my stylist, (2) find out I have to go to a wedding, and (3) promise me that you’ll do whatever it takes, that maybe you could give me a hairdresser that I could, I don’t know, actually communicate with as to my wishes?

Every time I’d stop her, by practically leaping out of the chair, and point out that she wasn’t cutting it the way I wanted (usually communicated at the level of "No straight lines", "cut layers", "chunky pieces", "no scissors – use razor"), she would say "OK", and then go back to giving me what amounted to a straight line no layers bowl cut that was so short I could feel the scissors against my head. It didn’t take me very long to demand a new stylist that didn’t require three people to translate (turns out, she did understand what I wanted, but decided she knew better and wasn’t going to listen). At this point, I’m crying. So i get a new stylist, who does the best that she can, but at this point the hair above my ears is so short that she really has no point but to give me some incredibly short bad 80s lesbian soccer mom spiky thing so that I don’t look like I have a giant mushroom sitting on top of my head.

Yeah. I didn’t pay for this. And I’m not even going to name the salon because they do have some good people there, but I really don’t understand how people in a service business can so completely disregard their customers’ wishes. Hair is a very personal thing. Maybe the colorist really thinks this color looks better on me than what I wanted. Maybe that first stylist really thought she knew best how my hair would look. But I’ve been living with this hair for 30 years, And if I make the wrong choice, it’s still my choice to make. And given that all I wanted was the same cut and color I have been getting for 3-4 years now, I really don’t understand why this happened. I’m pretty sure my friends would tell me if my hair has looked like shit for 4 years running.

Anyway, right now I have to go figure out how to re-cut my already extremely short bangs so that they no longer look like they belong on this guy’s head.

Tags: bitching