Digital haircut

I got my hair cut today. It had been about two months since my last shearing and so I was now sporting lateral tufts like Krusty the clown and quickly becoming the source of inter-company jokes, probably. An ex-colleague of mine shared some inner circle information on hair etiquette. To effect an image of professionalism one should get their hair cut very frequently (we're talking every three weeks tops). The idea is that a gentleman should always strive to maintain a consistent façade when dealing with business peers. Clients and contemporaries should not be able to detect if your hair actually grows or not and when you do get it cut you basically walk out the door of the barber looking the same as you did when you walked in.

Bollox to that. I am on a strict quin-annual regiment. People know when I come in to work with a new hair cut. Ronald McDonald disappears and a shaved Mr. Dunne digs in for another 10 week afro.

I went to Great Clips today. It's a chain hairdresser. You'll find it in any or every strip mall housing the usual suspects (Starbucks, McDonalds, Leann Chin, Caribou Coffee, Subway, Dress Barn, Home Depot, Target, Best Buy, Rainbow...). It was a Sunday and my usual barber, Pete Lebak, was closed. My afro was at critical mass and I simply couldn't wait until the following Saturday to have the Canadian fix me proper. I had to cave and cave I did. How I will ever explain my disloyalty to Pete I can't say. I'm in for quite the beating.

I walked in the door of Great Clips to what looked like the set of an early 1990's Australian soap opera. One of the stylists who was busy mulletizing a customer approaches the counter, says hello and then asks for my phone number. This regularly happens when I buy something with credit card. The intent of the question is to achieve one of two possible goals:

1. Validate that the given number matches the card holder’s number that the sales assistant is looking at on the screen therefore confirming that I am truly the card owner and have not mugged it from some poor sap. It's a weak method of identity theft prevention in my opinion.
2. Use my number in automated verbal junk mail initiatives that the corporation believes will entice me to spend money at one of their conveniently located establishments. Those tricks never work on a man as sharp as me. As soon as I hear that robot voice it's all over. Sometimes I swear at the machine. It feels no pain. It can’t cry.

Since I had yet to get actually get my $14 hair cut the lady obviously wasn't interested in credit card theft and so Sherlock Holmes here had to assume that late night or early morning solicitation calls were on the menu. I explained that I'd rather not hand over my number as I really hated those phone calls. We don't do that she explains. Turns out that Great Clips intended to use my number to build me a customer profile which records the style of my haircut on each visit so that if I go back a few weeks (or months in my case) later all they have do is punch in my phone number and up pops an entire history of all the haircuts I've ever gotten at Great Clips. I then choose a style from my data base and the job gets done. My phone number is my ID is my key to a digital haircut. Stupid, excessive, efficient, ingenious, American.

I’m going back to the guy who smokes and swears as he rips my hair out with a blunt as hell scissors and gives me no change from whatever fistful of bills I offer him. There are no price lists at Pete Lebak Barber Stylist, there are no manners, his sedentary cancer surviving golden Labrador stinks the place up and in a drawer Pete keeps a photo of the 5lb tumor they pulled out of him a few months back, the dirty magazines are piled high for the elderly customers to read, he tells stories that belong in best selling non-fiction books, he's friends with everyone who thinks like him and those who don't, well... he owns a lot of guns, he's been all over the world, he'll set your heart burning with desire to explore places out west that nobody goes to. He has no computerized systems that guarantee the haircut you get will exactly replicate the one you got last time. No, you get what you get. If he's in a warm mood you'll get a great haircut and leave with stories you wish were tales that narrated your life. If he's hung-over and in a foul mood because he slipped on an icy step and broke three ribs you'll get a shit haircut... That's life.

But the experience will be real, you'll leave no data behind.