I never cease to be amazed — befuddled even — at clients who sit down across from me and put their arms up on my table, while leaving their chair three feet away from the table, and usually sideways. Just their hands are dangling on my side of the arm rest; hanging there, way on the other side of the desk from where I need them.

Granted, my chairs don't slide across the carpet as easily as I'd like — so it's not as easy to belly-up to the table as it should be. But seriously, they really think I can manipulate their hands to do their nails when I'm leaning over the table like that?

Once I get them to actually pull their chair up to the table — even if it requires rolling my freakin’ desk two feet forward — then they inevitably insist on talking with their hands. This must look hilarious to any outside observers while I chase hands through the air like a cat chasing a feather toy.

Once I convince them to stop talking with their hands, they say "oops!" and then *!BANG!* down on the table top go their hands — nails first. I can hear the clank of the nails against the table! If I did that with my hands it would hurt like a *!#@!* but as I cringe and cry out "noooooOOOOOOOooooo" in slow motion, they just look up at me with those obliviously innocent eyes, bat their eyelashes, and say "what?"

I tell them, "Gee, I have no idea how you break you nails."

Then, what I really want them to do is roll their elbows outward on the armrest so that their hands will lay parallel to the desktop. This way I can actually get to both sides of their nails. But when I gently try to move their elbows out, they automatically pull them in, turning their hands perpendicular to the desktop so I have to contort my back into some sort of crazy Dr. Seussian character shape in order to see the nails at all, let alone actually reach them

I tell them I don't need them to hold their boobs up.

What really gets me is that they genuinely seem to have no earthly clue what I am doing here! They point, they text, they want to reach into their pockets or their purses in the middle of everything ... Do they not realize that getting their nails done means that the nail tech will need access to their hands?

Where do they think their nails are, anyway?