Entangling the coils

The hairy situation gets out of hand when the volume is too much to handle. Have you gone to the hair salon and the attendant feels your hair and says they can’t deal with it? Well, I have, believe me I cried all the way to the next salon which was about 300 meters away. But I arrived at the second hair hospital, explained to the attendant that my hair is quite course and tangled, asked if she can manage it and she told me to sit in the chair where she tried her best to entangle the situation in an hours’ time. Granted I do not know how to maintain the crown on my head, because it gets easily entangled and the growth becomes so bushy that many combs have broken attending to the natural head insulation. Let us shift focus on my grooming skills and let me discuss how uncouth some hair dressers are. I heard of a story, not hair related but let me share it; A sick person went to the hospital and found someone dressed in a white lab coat and assumed them to be a doctor so the patient went ahead to disclose to the ‘doctor’ of her ailments, who went ahead to prescribe drugs. You know how the story ends, the medication did not work. Can you relate? You walk into an institution expecting to get your issues sorted but they give you a misdiagnosis or others start passing you around from one desk to another where you explain your misfortune over and over again and at the end of the day you get little or no assistance. When someone opens an institution to offers services but encounter a professional challenge, how do you respond to it? If it’s beyond your expertise.

Back to my hair story, the first hairdresser went about asking me to comb it-myself, help her do the job am paying for, asking to add more money claiming to use other chemicals, claiming how it is taking up too much of other clients’ time and telling the colleagues how impossible it is to deal with it. This crashed my spirit, almost cursing the woman whom I inherited from and questioning why I was gifted this bunch of non-synthetic strands. It hurts while combing, plaiting and braiding, but it hurts the most when someone who does not know how it feels makes a mockery of the situation, giving unwarranted advice or scolding you like a child. Believe me it’s a blessing to have a full hairline leaving the forehead with little room to fit in the eyebrows. It is a greater blessing to find an individual who understand what it takes to keep this hair straight. We have a narrative that hair salons promote gossip by discussing a client who just left or celebrity affairs, but most people will get a bad hair-do, not confront the stylist and leave the premises disappointed. It is hard to reverse the remarks and treatment gotten from the hair specialist who see their clients as lazy beings who would rather pay them than break a sweat to run our fingers through the coils.

Speaking on behalf of all the hard-haired ladies everywhere, to the salon workers, ‘We need tender care while dealing with our heads, I hope we are not asking for much, please stop judging and discriminating our kind, treat us like other customers even though we take much of your time and energy’.