TODO: Some sort of pun on "hair"

I went for a haircut last night - a stressful experience for someone who up until recently got his hair cut at the very reasonably priced barbershop-of-the-parents.

Having picked a place based on it being on my way home from work (a glowing recommendation, I'm sure anyone would agree) and on having no queue (in retrospect, possibly a bad sign), I scored the odd-hairdresser-out. Where his four fellow barbers were mid-twenties and black-clad, with modern spiked hair, he was white-shirted, red-faced and looked to be nearing retirement age. I thought I'd be getting the experienced option, but in fact, I might have ended up with a gentleman trying out a second career. If this were the case, picking a career that required steady hands might have been a mistake, and though I escaped without injury, more than once I felt the smooth glide of blade on ear.

"What do you want?" is a difficult question. What I really want is to have a thinner face, or at least a face which can sport a short haircut without looking like someone has carelessly left a doormat improbably balanced on top of a flesh hot-air balloon. This, though, is not something barbers can provide, in my experience so far. Hence, I normally mumble something about fringes and then let them get one with it.

Get on with it, however, this one did not. He kept re-evaluating the length and asking for my opinion: "This long?", "How about this long?". I just said yes every time, though I wanted to say "I have no earthly idea what would look good - please just make it a bit shorter and not look like total crap. That's all I want". I didn't, because that might have been construed as rude, and I was at something of a disadvantage, having my arms pinned at my sides, while he had several pairs of scissors and a straight razor.

In the end he stopped asking me, and just combed my hair back and forth, occasionally cutting at random strands, while remarking "..is very long..." and "...is very strange..." under his breath. At some arbitrary point he declared himself done, and I escaped with a new do which perfectly matched my internal request of not being total crap. Satisfied with the result if not totally with the experience, I'm unsure as to whether to venture within again, in case I'm not so lucky next time round.

Seriously, though - do people actually know what to ask for in barbers? I have no idea how to describe what I want it to look like, except for "like it is now, except a bit shorter all over". Does anyone ever actually take in pictures, or point at the ones on the wall?

nicely-trimmed blogathon score: 6