Talk With the Mouth, Not With the Hands

Why do they all have to talk with their hands while I’m holding a drill against their nail beds? Seriously, I appreciate the trust, but let’s get real.

Aside from chasing their hands through the air like I was hunting flies, they text, or talk on the phone, which is really bad because they never have/bring/use a hands-free device. So they actually have to hold the phone up against their ear. Or worse, they try to do that thing where you hold the phone against your ear with your shoulder. This makes doing their nails dang near impossible. If your shoulder isn’t relaxed, you cannot relax your arm.

If they absolutely insist on having a phone conversation during their nail appointment, I always try to get them to just go ahead and hold the phone up to their ear with their hand. I will patiently — or feigning patience — work on their free hand because having them switch back and forth not only makes my job more difficult but they just never seem to understand how much gunk they get on their nails every time they put their hand against their face.

Yeck. That hand comes back to my desktop visibly covered in makeup and oil from their face. How do they not notice?

Also, it seems that the only time a client talks on the phone during their appointment is if they have a really important call that just can’t wait till one hour later. Which, I guess, is a nice compliment — I appreciate that they’d rather talk to me. Sometimes it’s super girlfriend drama, but most often, it’s work-related. So it goes without saying that if my client is talking on the phone during her nail appointment it’s going to be a tense conversation.

Oh yay. So not only do I have to chase down and wrestle their hands into place, but the stress of their conversation is acted out through their hands.

Honestly, most of my clients don’t talk on the phone through their appointments, but all it takes is one or two in a week’s time to stress me out. (Can you tell?) It makes me run behind schedule, my hands ache at the end, I’m not happy with the quality of my work, and I just want to bang my head against a wall in frustration.

How is it that so many people just totally fail to grasp the concept that in order to do their nails, I must be able to hold their hands?