By @goodworkmyboy

Listen to my own advice or not

It all started the day I was playing kayak polo with some friends this summer. The first of many times I fell in the water I got a lot of seaweed on my head or I thought it was seaweed but it was just my hair. At that point I hadn’t noticed that it was that long.

It was time for a haircut and why not try to get it as cheap as possible and save some money for my  new life in London. I found a deal which saved me 50% and I was happy.

When I called the hairdresser I got a temperamental, negative, young woman on the phone asking aggressively  for a number for the deal. I found it right away and got the appointment. After this conversation my first thought was “what a strange reaction from a person who should be service-minded”. At this point my intuition told me I shouldn’t go there, but I thought that she maybe had a bad day.

Ready for the haircut with a smile

The day came for my appointment and, as learned in the military, it’s better to be there too early than too late. I entered the salon 10 minutes before the appointment and the hairdresser told me to come back in 10 minutes, instead of offering me coffee as all other hairdressers would have done.

After 40 minutes and some verbal assault on my hair I was ready to leave the salon with my new hair. I checked out if everything was as it should be, because the day before they sent an email telling me that the deal was activated because of my appointment and therefore I didn’t need to bring a print of the deal number.

Surprising solution

Now the hairdresser’s only suggestion was that I should pay for a regular haircut even though I paid for the deal before making the appointment. I told her that they had already activated the deal code on the day I made the appointment but she didn’t care. She got more and more angry and blocked the door so I couldn’t escape before I paid the full price. I was calm and tried to find a solution to the “problem”, I even proposed to get the paper and be back in 10 minutes. There was no chance to come up with a solution other than leaving the salon even though she was still were blocking the door. I opened the door, even though it meant that I “pushed” her a little into the salon. It now escalated even more, she attacked me with the broom twice before she called for help and some steroided-up neighbour came ready to beat me up. Nothing happened, and I got pushed away very bemused, in shock, with a very dry mouth.

Return to the unpleasant

After standing in the rain for 15 minutes I went back to get my bike. She was standing in the doorway and was a little calmer but she told me that she would report me to the police for assault. I was even more shocked than before and of course apologised again.  

A little detail that explained her aggressiveness was that she was pregnant. If she reacted the way she did in the salon then anything can happen, even reporting me as an assailant. Again I was shocked; I’d never experienced something like this before.

Between books

Now looking back on this situation the first thing that comes to my mind is that “I should have trusted my intuition instead of neglected it”. In the book, Thinking Fast and Slow, they talk about intuition as something that is built up by experiences and that you can’t trust it. But if it wasn’t the intuition I didn’t listened to, what was it? A feeling about something that I couldn’t put into words or describe as anything else other than my intuition. Should I trust my intuition more in the future…? Just let my subconscious decide what to do..?

“One little thing can make a big difference” says the book, The Tipping Point. In my story, this little thing must be the stupid piece of paper with a number on. Hopefully this won’t start an epidemic.