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Saturday 15 October 2016

IN FEAR OF HAIRDRESSERS

I seem to spend half my life in fear of hairdressers. I have to say here and now that generally speaking I am not easily intimidated, can stand up for my rights (and those of others whether they like it or not) and call a spade a bloody shovel……BUT….hairdressers reduce me to a quivering heap of jelly. I hop from one to another around the Inner and Eastern suburbs of Auckland and have done so for more than twenty years, in the vain and diminishing hope of finding one who doesn’t frighten me. All I want is a hair professional I can stand up to, one to whom I can say `NO – what you have done looks like shit, please rectify at once’ instead of `Oh I’m really pleased with it….see you next time,’ as I scurry out fuming with rage. I then console myself by determining I will never, ever go back to her and have often been reduced to wearing sunglasses and headscarfs in order to pass through the particular suburb in which she preys on the unsuspecting client. Sometimes I have avoided an entire district for more than a year. I then have a habit of dropping into those no appointment, just-come-in-now places in shopping malls where the general philosophy is not to bully the customer. They don’t care what you want, they just do whatever you ask them to and what’s more their charge out rates are very low. The only problem with this is that should I then go back to whoever is `My’ current hair professional of the moment I am subjected to the kind of cross examination that Josef Stalin would have been proud of. I am forced to lie. I say I have been in France for three months and popped into some scruffy little place in Lyon. Once in St. Heliers I was actually challenged with, `….if you’ve been away how come I’ve seen you in the street wearing sunglasses then…?’ It’s not as if I want anything too special done with my hair in the first place – I want it as short as is possible, spikey, the grey covered with any colour you like to suggest and NO, I really don’t care if that makes me look like a twelve year old absconder from the local school. I thought I had found the perfect hair person recently, in a city arcade. She was smiley and strangely servile so I went back to her three times. However last week she seemed to have gained confidence as she snarled, `Who has cut your hair last? It was NOT me!’ With very ill grace she fulfilled my request for multi coloured foils but when it came to cutting she put her foot down, in fact she very nearly had a temper tantrum. `What you want is not at all feminine and I will NOT do it!’ Half an hour later I heard myself saying something like, `Yes, it’s lovely. You were quite right. See you next time.’ Time for new sunglasses!

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