For the last 19 1/2 years I have been rather stubborn about not making confirmation calls. I am not a babysitter, and I firmly believe that if you aren't responsible enough to keep the appointments you make, then you have no business making appointments.

But the times, they do achange, don't they? I've made several mentions of my observations in changing cultural attitudes toward consumerism and, in particular, how those changes affect us.

An entire generation of clients has now grown up in a world where being able to walk in to any corner nail salon on a whim has been an option in nearly every town in the U.S.

I'm thrilled to see that — as I predicted over 10 years ago — many of those clients are coming around to realizing that there really is a difference in quality. And people of all ages, income levels, and lifestyles are putting forth the effort to find a good nail tech. And I truly do find, for the most part, that those clients desperately want to be good clients — they just never learned how. They learned to be the type of clients who go to the type of salons that don't care what type of clients they have. So when they find us, they find us with all the bad habits that walk-in, assembly-line-style salons allow and even encourage in their clientele.

It only makes sense: If you're business model is based on walk-in traffic, why would you ever expect your clients to plan in advance and make — and keep — appointments?

See? It's nobody's fault, really. But that's not what I was talking about...

Like I said, I have never offered confirmation calls. Or e-mails. Or texts. But at some point, you realize you have a lot of really great clients who would keep their appointments if they only remembered them. It can be hard to remember that other people don't live and die by their calendar the way I do.

So one thing that I discovered during my "I'll give it a whirl" time with the aforementioned Styleseat was that my clients really liked getting the text message reminders. And it helped reduce the "Oh! I forgot" no-shows to mere "Oh! I can't make it!" reschedules. But, as I mentioned, Styleseat and I are not a perfect match just yet. And so the search was on for an "app for that."

I didn't intend to turn my week's posting into a review party, but in case you're interested, I discovered apptoto — which syncs to my Google calendar and is reasonably priced compared to similar services I found.

Super cool.