First I’ll Need Your Credit Card Number, Sir

Working in a salon has been an interesting experience throughout my entire career. Aside from all the usual adventures, I have never received so many obscene phone calls! Even when I did that for a living!

Back in the days before caller ID was commonly available, the salon I worked in would get at least three or four such calls a week. And those were the serious, heavy-breathing, disgusting-information sort.

The girl I worked with back then loved it when they called because I am not intimidated — or offended — by that sort of thing. And — as I mentioned — I used to have a job that paid me well to listen to those calls. So it’s not like I was going to get all squeamish or anything. Which usually ended with the caller disappointed.

When Mom came to work with me in the early 2000s, we had a foot fetishist who called on a regular basis. Mom loved talking to him. He’d start out asking perfectly legitimate questions about pedicure prices and procedures and digress to absurd inquiries about how women like to paint their toenails. When toenail enhancements became popular, he started asking how long we made the nails and if anyone ever got their toenails done “really long.”

Mom had a blast egging him on and our clients got a ton of laughs out of watching her facial expressions as she exaggerated her answers.

Caller ID really slowed down those calls. But every so often I get “lucky” when one of those “private” callers shows up on the caller ID.

I’ve really only had one call that creeped me out a tad. Once it becomes apparent that the caller is more interested in the gory details of my business than he is in doing business with me, I like to ask for a credit card number. Remember to get the zip code and the CCV code from the back, and just type it into your Square register by hand. Someday, someone is going to give me his credit card number, and I’ll charge him $6.95 a minute to give him a detailed description of my top-of-the-line pedicure. I figure that’ll be a win/win.

So far they’ve all opted to hang up on me instead. Other salons are probably willing to give it away for free.