Not wishing to be rude about the individuals to which I am referring, but isn’t it refreshing when you meet someone genuinely a lot thicker than you?
For me this is a fairly rare event seeing that I am blonde and from Reading, but a trip to the hairdressers today left me feeling almost on the verge of applying to MENSA.
You see Fridays are ‘stylist days’ at my hairdressers which generally means that students in their last year of a BTEC in ‘Hair Management and Follicle Technology’ (or whatever they call it now) are let loose on the general public with their shiny new scissors. Today I was presented with one of these people called ‘Rhea’, who was suitably bright and perky and wore enormous slouch socks over her ugg boots. Admittedly she was very pleasant and chatty and we discussed the weather, her holiday to Marbella and seeing the Spice Girls in concert (her boyfriend bought tickets for her birthday). It was when we got to the inevitable question of ‘what I do for a living’ however that my hair stylist friend became a little confused.
“Plannin’, so what do you do for Plannin”?
“I help look at where we can build houses and schools and things“.
“What, like you can build a house”?
“No, that’s what a builder does, I plan where it goes and what it could look like”.
“So like what carpet they have”?
“Yes, that’s right”….
Oh god bless her! Another endearing moment came when I went to settle the bill, which as a result of it being ‘student afternoon’, was a lot more reasonable than I was expecting…
“You bin here before”?
“Yes I have”.
“Last name please?”
“Turner”
<Having witnessed what she was tapping on the keyboard> “That’s Turner with a ‘U’, not an ‘E’ (I could see that that was fair enough – the girl is called Rhea, she is probably unaware of names not made up of her mothers name and a bowel condition).
The next bit however was my favourite – after being questioned about my address…
“You live in Readin’?”
“Yes”
“Same one spelt like the festival?”
“Yes”
“Is that Walk with a ‘W?”
“Umm…Yes”…
“And an ‘L'” – (her pronunciation made me fear she was about to add another ‘w’).
Having paid my bill and retrieved my velvet wonder and stripy scarf from the coat cupboard, I was very pleased to have been given a small sample of designer shampoo and was waved off in a very friendly manner;
“Nice one, fanks Emily, see you in 6 weeks then”…
Oh you certainly will, for my ego if nothing else!
All in all though I was very pleased with my hair cut. It is choppy and layered and exactly what I wanted – and at 18 years young, ‘Rhea’ has plenty of time to find out the spelling of names and places, and who knows might even make it into a planning office one day…
Even if it is to choose carpet.
I had a similar experience when I went to get my hair cut before a friend’s wedding in the Summer. In response to her questions about my forthcoming weekend, I said I was going to Scotland for a friend’s wedding. We both pulled faces at how far that was to travel from Hampshire so I said I’d be flying to Edinburgh then driving North from there.
“Is Edinburgh in Scotland, then?”
:-/