Being a hairstylist often means you’re a low-tech person in
a high-tech world. We don’t need a bunch of fancy electronic gadgets to do our
job and in my salon, we stubbornly insist on remaining in the technological
Dark Ages…client records are recorded on cards and kept in recipe boxes and
appointments are written in an actual appointment book made out of paper and
everything. No computer, no computerized client database, no online booking
system, no receptionist walking around with a Bluetooth stuck in her ear that
makes her look like she’s a crazy person talking to herself. My boss and I are
old school technophobes, and we like it that way, thankyouverymuch.
My boss shuns technology. He takes great pride in not having
a cel phone, nor an email address. He thinks social media is a complete waste
of time and has declared the internet to be a “fad”. I, on the other hand, am a
technology fence-straddler and have a love/hate relationship with technology…a
perfect example is I own a blackberry and enjoy being able to text, check my
email and see who’s following me on Twitter, but I have no idea how to use any
apps on it, no idea how to use the speakerphone and no fucking clue where the
mute button is (which is a source of massive annoyance because my phone likes
to lock itself for no apparent reason and to unlock it you have to press the
mute button. Which I can’t do because I still cannot find the fucking mute
button after 3 years of blackberry ownership. And have to resort to turning the
phone on and off). Also? It took me 2 years to figure out how to clear the
cache on my laptop. And I have a couple videos I downloaded and have NO idea
where they are (apparently hidden in the bowels of some kind of laptop
no-man’s-land, never to be found again). How can someone who spends half their
life blogging and searching google for shit like bacon art and nose porn still
be so technologically inept that when the laptop tells them to “press any key”
they spend 5 minutes searching the keyboard while yelling “Where the hell is
the any key?? WHERE?????” It’s a fucking conundrum, I tell you.
Lately I have decided to somewhat embrace technology for
work-related stuff. Partly because we now have 2 other co-workers who are young
and wise enough to see the value in using social media to market themselves,
and since I’m already on Facebook 10 times a day, maintaining a page for the
salon seems like a smart move. Our boss, despite his aversion to all things
internet, agrees this is a good idea…even though he’s never even looked at the
page and has no plans to ever look at it. Which means we could post some pics
of him at the staff Xmas party and he’d never know unless one of his clients
happened to see it. But then he’d probably take revenge by getting his wife to
put the video of certain staff members trying to drunkenly belly-dance on you
tube and trust me, NO ONE needs to see that video. And I’m pretty sure drunk
belly-dancing videos are not the way to build your client base
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