Do you prefer to chat, or silence?

Which do you prefer?

  • Shut up and cut my hair!

    Votes: 45 73.8%
  • Ask me the standard questions strangers ask.

    Votes: 16 26.2%

  • Total voters
    61
I don't mind having small talk with my hairdresser, mostly because I've known her for five years. However, because I only go every three months or so, she manages to forget everything about me when I come back. It used to annoy me until I realised I could basically fabricate stories and she would never catch on.

Edit : I'm also blind as hell without my glasses, so talking is a way to make sure we understood each other.
 
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I chat with my haircut person. It's not a huge deal and it makes the time go faster.
Is a haircut a service for you or just a task?
It's good to talk with people doing services. Good, vaguely personal but mostly time-filling chats allow you to get to know that person and improve their ability to remember you, may give tangential information about how/why you want the service done that informs the manner they do it in, and if the service was completed phenomenally, it improves your ability to remember and positively ID the person you want as your go-to "employee"; questions like 'what's your typical schedule' or 'when will you be here' that may otherwise make them uncomfortable will instead be easy for them to answer honestly. Networking is good and healthy behavior, both for long term dividends and from a purely emotional standpoint.
This goes the other way, too, non-talkative purely professional types may prefer fellow non-talkative purely professional types and appreciate you shutting up after becoming acquainted and reciprocate. It's a fine line to tread between 'I am not talking because you annoy me' and 'I am not talking because I'm giving you time to complete this service' and that can impact performance, so if you get that fact established with somebody and they do good work, you'd do just as well to remember them.
Tasks should be completed quickly or quietly because the quality of that task's completion has a very narrow band of "very good, good, not good, very poor", and since there's no fine-tuning, all the working parts are interchangeable. Many people are task oriented and assign tasks to things they do not give much intrinsic value, and the taskmen view their employer with a separate but equal apathy. Tasks tend to be either collective (see recent shitposting about how everybody ignores bus drivers) or routine and unappealing (see mail delivery).

With all that out of the way, ask yourself if the typical kind of person who posts on Kiwifarms highly values their haircut (or style) and is comfortable enough with social networking to engage in it on the spot, with a near-total stranger. Once you've come to a conclusion, look back at the poll and be unsurprised. Not a value judgement, just common sense.
edit: also since a lot more goes into women's hair, they tend to form relatively personal relationships with their hairdressers both autonomously and for these reasons. Kiwifarms still seems to be mostly male, unless I missed some sort of dramatic paradigm shift and the farmers have been overtaken by the farmgirls.
 
I actually stopped getting my hair cut by pros precisely for this reason. I find their gossiping and general chit-chat intolerable. A process that should take 15mins takes hours in the hands of people who are gossiping with coworkers. I've been cutting my own hair since and I don't regret it.

tldr; I'm not paying you to hear you gossip for 2-3hrs
 
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It better be about my hair, because I don't give a damn about your kids, or your husband, and I certainly don't like being talked to like I'm one of the 20 Questions toys they used to sell in supermarkets so parents could shut their kids up for the rest of the shopping trip.
 
I like conversation. I'll drive past 5 barbershops just to go to the guy that always cuts my hair just because the conversation is so good.
 
I prefer talking because silence makes me feel uncomfortable.
 
I'm shy and a little awkward so I've never been good at conversations. :oops:
 
I don't care either way because I'm not a blonde bimbo or some misanthropic autist. That's right, baby, I'm the rational skeptic of the haircutting horseshoe. Fuck you.
 
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Edit: Gah! - I didn't read anything but the title. Silly me.

Depends on my mood. If the hairdresser is easy to talk to and I'm feeling good, then sure.
 
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My next door neighbor cuts my hair cut but he's about my age and it's an actual barbershop and we have similar interests so it's easy to chat with him.
 
Small talk for sure.

My barber since childhood who's since retired was such a great man. He was a first gen immigrant from Italy. A walking stereotype of the people in a good way. He was not formally educated but incredibly bright. I could sit down and say "Gino I need to build a rocket ship" some how he'd know. He just talked with everyone and soaked up anything he learned.

He was a gentleman if kids or women were around very well spoken, second they left he couldn't finish a sentence relating to sports with out the F bomb lol. We loved to talk baseball, we also talked inflation a lot (economics not Dobson style)

The guy I have now, I found on a whim he's a very young black guy and the shop is in the ghetto i'm probably the only white person who's ever gone there. He always says I'll come out looking like X white famous person here. He does a great job, the shop is a total stereotype. But he's a young dude mid 20s owns a home shares ownership of the shop. I think it's kinda a understood thing it's about the show for me. People literally walk in the back to smoke pot, talk about jail etc. But he does a great job for stupid cheap and I tip well. Our small talk is often about cars or girls.

For a while I had a guy who liked to talk camping that was cool but he moved.
 
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