The Worst Updo I Never Gave
When I was 15, I got my first outside-the-house, outside-the-neighborhood job, a role that didn’t include babysitting—my siblings or my neighbors’ kids. I began working for the local “haircut place.” (I called it that because it wasn’t a barbershop, but it also wasn’t a salon; it was an establishment that primarily provided co-ed haircuts, but could also do slightly fancier things like a shampoo/blowdry, an updo, and even a perm.)
It was at this job that I learned the value of clear communication. It wasn’t that I didn’t know how to share information in a way that made sense. One particular week, I’d come down with a cold, an elevated case of the sniffles. When I was deemed noncontagious, I went back to work. Except my communication skills were challenged.
The cost of a haircut back in the late 90s was $9.99. With a stuffed-up nose, it proved difficult, sometimes impossible, to articulate this price to inbound callers. That’s usually all they wanted to know: the price of a cut… in addition to whether they could get their hair cut when they arrived in “X” minutes. (Usually the answer to the latter was “no.” Even if it was a “yes,” that typically changed once they physically arrived at the store because a rush of customers followed.) Thank goodness for online check-in these days!
Getting the words out clearly, that was one kind of problem. Knowing which words to say at all, that turned out to be a much harder one.
A stuffy nose was one thing. Telling a manager her work was garbage was another kind of impossible altogether. I had to keep the managers happy—and their workstations spotless of hair clippings—but I also needed to keep the customers happy. Unavoidable scenarios arose in which I couldn’t do both simultaneously. Like the one time my main manager, the head honcho, gave a poor victim the worst excuse for an updo I’d ever seen. I didn’t have a beautician’s license and would’ve done a better job.
The customer was a teenage girl who was headed to prom that evening… or maybe not after her visit. She left in tears. I’m sure it was hard for her mom to pay the bill after that. Of course, the manager asked me why the girl was upset afterwards. I feigned ignorance. There was no answering that question honestly. The girl and her mom had already left; I was stuck with the manager indefinitely.
Looking back, I wonder what would have happened if I’d been 100% honest. Other managers would’ve thanked me for the feedback. That manager? Probably not. I didn’t feel like risking my job that day. I still lived at home and went to high school locally. It wasn’t the time or place to push back.
These days, there’s more on the line, now that I pay my own bills and support a family. And yet, somehow, I’ve found more boldness. I still don’t know if that’s growth, or if I just ran out of places to hide the truth.
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