Once upon a time I found myself suckered into the “time is money” mantra and worked very hard to get all my service times to under one hour.

This made me miserable. Every night I would go home with my hands locked into a painful claw shape, I was always stressed out, and my conversations with clients were rushed.

I gave it up. I book at least an hour and a half for nearly all my services now. Everyone seems much happier and my hands don’t hurt nearly as bad.

On the other hand, I do very few lunch-hour appointments now. Let’s face it, even at a one-hour service time, getting a fill or a set on your lunch hour wasn’t reasonable — you still had to account for travel time at least, if not time to actually eat something.

I don’t understand why giving an employee an hour-and-a-half lunch break every other week is really so undoable for employers? I’ve tried to turn it around and think of it from an employer’s perspective. I think I could do it. Especially if I’m not paying that employee for that extra half hour. As long as their work is getting done, I’d be willing to allow for the fact that there are just some things that people need to get done between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m.

Even if my clients’ employers aren’t willing to spot them an extra half hour every other week, I wish that businesses would at least respect that their employees’ appointments have merit. Don’t make life miserable for my clients when they can’t come in on a scheduled day off because they have a nail appointment.

Yeah, sure, in the big picture, a nail appointment might not be all that important. But neither is your coffee house or your retail discount clothing store. I could understand if your employees are calling in sick to go to their nail appointments (for the record, I happen to be fine with that), but if they scheduled an appointment on their day off, don’t get all futzy when you try to get them to come in when they were expecting to have the day off.

I’m a business too. I’m part of the community and I’m part of the local economy. If my clients can’t come get their nails done, then I can’t come buy cheap clothes at your store, then your employee gets her hours cut and she can’t afford to get her nails done anyway — that’s a lose/lose/lose situation. Because you didn’t think a nail appointment was important.

All I’m asking for is a little respect, and maybe businesses could work together to keep the economic cycle healthy.