I recently moved to Veraficta, a gorgeous fictional town of my own invention. My friends and cousins often complain about their offices, colleagues, managers and clients. So I decided to invent all of mine.
I now work as the Marketing Manager at The House of Hair, a salon and hair academy, which also runs its own haircare magazine and has a cosy little beauty store selling haircare products and books. I have always been interested in what people reveal when they are sitting still and paying someone to hold scissors near their head. See, I had told you I am a Cultural Observer, and a Chief Curiosity Officer (appointed by a committee composed only of me).
It is frankly a much better working arrangement. Now, if a coworker gets a bit overbearingly personal in their opinions, I politely ignore them forever. That is, I edit out their dialogues and never develop their character further. And if a client gets a bit irrational, I just never make them recurring. If I don’t like the colour palette of my desk, I just make the owner paint it pink with one dialogue! It is all magic! It is so empowering, it is so liberating. I have powers I have never possessed in real life.
Nobody at The House of Hair has ever sent me an email citing ‘Just circling back.’ I refuse to put that kind of violence in my fiction.
Every Saturday and Sunday, I send you an update. Against your better judgement. On the way a tech bro can tell his hair stylist, who is a stranger he has just met, how his receding hairline makes him feel scared and stressed while he puts up a confident face outside the salon with his friend group that claims to uphold the lifelong bro-code. Or the way a finance consultant will max out their credit card for a haircut after being heartbroken by both their love life and a layoff and then spend three weeks insisting they “don’t really care about appearances”. Or perhaps the way a woman can enter a salon asking for “just a trim” and leave having changed her hair, her opinion of her marriage and, possibly, the course of her life. Or the way people say they hate gossip and then somehow know everything.
“I have concluded that gossip is simply journalism conducted without citations.”
I have thigh-length hair and have had it for some years now, so naturally I have decided that I am professionally qualified to have opinions about hair. I will, of course, exercise humility about this. Occasionally.