Life At Slow-Mo

Yesterday I went to get a haircut. There was this express barbershop in a shopping mall that I used to visit almost regularly. But in the past two years, I chose to have my hair done in another place close to my house. It had been a while since I last saw the inside of the shop.

Before the pandemic, there would be three or four people waiting while three or four barbers working on the first comers. If I had wanted to avoid the queue, I would have had to come very early. As I approached the glass facade of the shop, there was no customers. I only saw two barbers. One was busy with her cellphone, while the other was tidying her station. None of them I recognized from the days I was a regular there.

“I’m here for a haircut,” I said to the one who hastily left her station and welcomed me as I walked in. “Please sit here, sir.” The one with the cellphone suddenly stood up and pointed at her station. “Is it my turn or your turn this time?” I overheard the tidying girl whispered to the other. “My turn,” said the cellphone girl. “I have done my cleaning for ages. You go finish up.”

She began working on my hair. “Business is slow nowadays, isn’t it?” I casually said to start a conversation.
“Yes, it is,” she replied. “Especially now that kids don’t go to school anymore.”
“You mean you used to get a lot of business from students?”
“Oh of course. You know, schools have hair regulations and no one can grow hair even a centimeter longer. Some kids get a haircut every two weeks. Now that they attend classes online, they don’t need to cut their hair that often. They only come here every three or four months. When their hair grow long, they simply put some gel in their hair and backcomb it. The teacher cannot tell the difference in online class.” She laughed a little at this.

“I used to come here frequently. I remember the stylist who regularly did my hair said that when it was very busy she could work 7 days a week.” While making the comment, I was thinking about the long queues I had seen, and I was contrasting that to what I saw that day.
“Yeah, that was the day. We used to work 12 hours every day.”

What she said is true. This barbershop was part of a franchised brand. The business model of the franchise is to give customers 10-minute, clean, no-frill cut at a very affordable price. To keep cost low, they only employed barbers with no assistant. So the barbers must do everything, from opening the store, welcoming customers, cutting hair, clean up, keeping stock, etc. 12 hours work means the barbers worked from opening to closing hours, mostly standing up, with some short breaks to use the restroom and to have lunch.

I once went to one branch where there was only one barber working with nearly a dozen customers in queue. She was so desperate for a restroom break. After finishing her work on a customer, she asked the remaining customers to step outside the shop and wait there so she could lock the shop up and make a quick getaway to the toilet. She had no choice because there was nobody else to watch the store while she went about her business. She was lucky that all the clients understood her situation and patiently followed her instructions. One customer I saw gave her a generous tip, almost twice the price of the haircut itself, and pat her on the shoulder encouragingly.

“But that was in the past. These days we only work five hours a day,” she said. “All of us used to be so busy, but now with customers so few we spread the work time among us so we all can work.”

“Are you on contract or full employment?” I asked in curiosity.
“The first year working here we are under contract. But after that, we are free to go if we want to.”
“I heard that you must take a training when you first come to work here. So the first year contract is to repay the cost of the training?” I speculated.
“Yes, that’s correct. But after that, we are free to leave if we want. That is why many of us feel happy to work with this franchisee. Here and in its other stores.” She was referring to the franchise holder who owned and ran that shop and several others.

It took her a little over ten minutes to cut my hair, and that’s the entire length of our conversation. I paid her and left the store with many thoughts racing in my mind. One thing that stood out was the fact that she and me talked in a past-tense. We talked like two people reminiscing about their high school days. We talked as though we were talking about things that took place way back in time that would never happen again. We acted as if we had accepted that the pandemic situation that we were in would be the only reality, and we had given up on experiencing the same past again.

Some experts suggest that accepting change is like accepting the loss of a loved one. You have to accept the reality that the person is no longer with you, and there is no way you can go back to the time when the person was still alive. The same applies to change in our lives. We have to accept that the reality will be different now, and we must let go of the past as though it is dead and cannot be brought to life again. Then we learn to live with the new reality the way we learn to live without the presence of our loved one.

I admire my barber for showing grit. She was just as professional, as thorough, and as serving as working in a busy store as she did working in a nearly deserted one. Like the rest of us, she did not know for how long the pandemic will last. She could not now for sure whether she would still be employed the next month. But her main concern was that she did her best for that day. And that’s the kind of spirit we can all live with in the New Year.

Happy the man, and happy he alone,
he who can call today his own:
he who, secure within, can say,
Tomorrow do thy worst, for I have lived today

Horace, Roman Poet, 65-8 BCP

Featured Image: Zen garden in Tenryu-ji Temple, Arashiyama, Kyoto, Japan. Photo: Stephen Siregar (2015). All Rights Reserved. Do not use without written permission.