Today was probably the first time in 10 years I’ve been to a hair salon! (haha, that’s a record long time, you hear that Guinness?) Usually I made use of the portable hair salon type services (a stylus going from house to house) or simply used the shaver boxed away in my dad’s collection of army stuff, but neither was available this time …
What really fascinated me about the hair salon is the way woman literally farm with hair like farmers would produce crop, watering, harvesting, ploughing and feeding the crop. They will come in, sit down and tell the stylus exactly what they want, the amount of layers, what colour, which layer they want curls, which layer they want straight, the angle at which the curls should be done, the amount of heat to apply, which direction it should be combed in, what types of shampoo they want to use while washing and some of them leave with 99.9999999% of their hair still on their head with maybe a few split ends cut off or a couple of gray hairs cut out.

What is even more fascinating is the amount of chit-chat, woman will come in and sit down, as soon as her buttocks touch the chair, she starts talking, after maybe 10 or 15 minutes the conversation will steer into the direction of what the stylus is interested in, especially if she’s the chatty type, otherwise the customer or crop will continue chatting. This is truly amazing, they have absolutely no fear of hair getting into their mouth, or have woman developed some special way of talking and magnetizing the falling hair in such a way that talking pushes falling hair away? That will probably explain how hair falling from a woman’s head can defy some laws of physics, take a look at all the obscure places it falls and notice how the chaos theory makes more sense than any form of physics.

Topics they chat about is a function of their age group, younger woman will talk about their job and their bosses and if the stylus is really friendly, they might start to share gossip, talking about their exes, current boyfriends or just have an intimate chat while the older woman will start to talk about the weather (haha, this one definite conversation starter with old people, old people can talk about the weather for hours), how Eskom is messing with their cooking, cleaning and other household chores, some of them will quickly touch the politics if they run out of something to say (and be totally clueless I might add) and for those who sit there longer than one hour usually switches to talking about their grand children, how sweet they are, what their children is currently doing and so on. Even more fascinating is how the chatty type stylus can have the same conversation 2 or 3 times an hour and still be so enthusiastic about it, either they are good liars or have a poor memory.

Then there’s the weird equipment they use, the brain fryers (those noisy machines they put over the old people’s heads) and disinfectant which they spray on everyone’s head upon the event of BTC (buttocks touch chair), I guess they have specially formulated that disinfectant to make provision for all types of hair bacteria, I wonder where they learn all this stuff! Something else I’ve noticed is the way they clean the floors, the hair on the floor is always broomed away to the back into a secret compartment not publicly visible, shouldn’t they inform their customers what they’re doing with the hair or is that kind of transparency seen as invasion of privacy?

If engineers want to create the world’s biggest unique LOREM IPSUM piece of text, they should rather get woman from a hair salon to create it than a machine generating the text, they produce much more words than hair each day, I guess the market value for hair is much higher than the market value for words, no wonder the stylus is so quiet when she brooms away the hair to the back of the salon . . .