The haircutter
I went to my usual barber shop today. This is not a place I particularly like. I chose it at random at some point and kept going there out of inertia. The people are fine, I don’t hate them. But none of them can trim my beard properly. My hair’s easy, number one buzzcut, no one gets that wrong. But the beard… it’s so easy to mess it up, and most of them do. After a few days it grows out and looks normal again, so I never minded it enough to look for a new place.
But today, a new guy worked on me. He looked younger than everyone else there. He had the frame of a young boy, but his face looked older, late 20s to early 30s. He acted strangely methodically. Every tool had a “right” spot on the table, and he kept rearranging them, like he needed that ritual to figure out what to do next. He kept asking me to not move. That’s not unusual, but the way he asked was more adamant than you’d expect from a barber. And his movements while working on my head were stiff and robotic. I figured he was new. He was nervous, maybe it was one of his first days on the job, and I was the lucky practice target. I didn’t mind.
He asked me what I did for work. I told him I’m a game developer. He acted surprised, like most people do, and asked what game I made. I replied with a deflection like I usually do - I really don’t like saying “SNKRX” out loud - so I asked him if he played games at all. He ignored that and instead asked if I played any games, which was a weird move. So I told him not that much, but sometimes. Then he said something like, “Ah, a game developer who doesn’t play games, that makes sense.” Which, honestly, it kind of does. Then he asked me how long I’ve been doing it, and I said fifteen years. That’s when he said he’d been a barber for fifteen years too. That surprised me! I thought he was a newbie.
He said that my beard made me look like an MMA fighter. I told him people say things like that to me a lot. That I look stern, rigid, aggressive. Some would even say that I look evil. Could you believe that? Me? Evil!? I’d never even hurt a fly. But this is what people say about me. Others say I look like I’m from a favela, which is fair. I have mixed skin color (black mom, white dad), and with the buzzcut, the beard, and I guess some sharpness in my face, people make that connection. I don’t blame them.
He then explained why that impression happens. He talked about how different face shapes affect the way people read you. How certain features emphasize certain emotions or qualities, depending on what you do with the beard, the hair and even the eyebrows. Then he pulled out his phone and showed me examples. A man with a square face needed a rounded beard to soften it. A man with a round face could use a more triangular beard to make his face look thinner and longer.
He talked about how Superman had a square face with a square hairstyle, but that little curl in the front gave him just enough roundness to avoid looking too stern or too rigid. Then he mentioned how younger people, at around age 15, go through an identity crisis, and how they usually go for stronger and more distinctive hair styles. But someone in their early 30s, like me, already knows who they are, and can go with something more defined, more stable. As far as aesthetic theory goes, it all made sense. I told him I consider similar things when composing the screens in my games, and how elements have to match and balance each other out. He nodded, then kept going with even more detail.
Every now and then, while explaining something, he’d ask me, “Did no one ever tell you this?” I’d say no, and he’d shake his head and say something like, “The respect people have for their own profession is so low these days.” Or, “People just don’t care about doing things right anymore.” He said things like this maybe five times. Clearly, he believed he was good at his job, and that most people around him weren’t.
I almost laughed the first time he said it, because I realized, this guy was literally me. The way he talked about his field, the way he kept lamenting the state of barbers, it was exactly the same as how I go on about the state of indie devs. And seeing it from the outside like this… I could see just how off-putting it was. How arrogant it was. How wrong it made me feel to listen to this young little boy speak so casually, and with so much disdain, about his coworkers who were literally in the same room and could hear every word.
A few times, I said something wrong, and he’d ask, “Who told you that?” One example was a beard cream I’d been using every day. He said, “No, no, that’s totally wrong. Your beard needs to be less dry. You need to use this oil instead. Who told you to use that cream?” Well, the guy literally standing behind you told me that. But I didn’t want to make things awkward, so I said I didn’t remember who it was.
Another time, I asked him to remove some nose hairs that were bothering me. But I told him to only remove the ones near the edge. Last time, the guy who did it removed all of them, and I spent like two months with zero nose hairs. It was very weird. When I said that, he asked, “Who did that?” This time it seemed like he was holding a knife behind his smile. Still soft-voiced, still friendly-faced, a veritable nice boy. But his aura was getting oppressive. I started lightly sweating. I tried to steer the conversation elsewhere, but he didn’t let up.
As the conversation went on, he mentioned that this chain of barber shops was going through a restructuring. They were “removing inefficiencies” and trying to hire better people. That’s when it clicked. He wasn’t just a barber. He was some fucking 30-year-old little boy CEO! It all made sense now. The careful glances from the other barbers. The long silences. The tension in the room I hadn’t noticed until now. I thought they were watching the newbie to see if he knew what he was doing. But no. They were watching their boss. He wasn’t there to cut hair, he was there to cut half of them loose!
Eventually, he leaned the chair all the way back and told me to lie still, face pointing straight up. He grabbed a hot towel and laid it across my face. He asked me if it was too hot, I said it wasn’t. It stayed there for a few minutes. He took the towel off, dried my face a little, and applied shaving cream where it needed to be cut. Then he started cutting. His movements were sharp and exact. The razor met my skin, and with strokes that ended as quickly as they started, he moved to the next section.
As he cut, he talked. He said no one paid attention to detail anymore. That people just did the bare minimum and expected praise. That no one cared about doing the job right. He said that no one wanted to learn anything new. That they didn’t want to study. That they didn’t want to escape mediocrity. That if they just paid attention - really paid attention - they’d see all the things they’d been doing wrong. The knowledge was there. They just had to seek it out. But no one cared enough anymore.
This lasted a few oppressive minutes. I stayed quiet. Face up, neck exposed, still as a corpse. I was getting uncomfortable. He could see it in my face, but he didn’t care. And then, just like that, it was over. He said he was done. He raised the chair and I looked at myself in the mirror and smiled.
He got my beard right!