Whew. My editor tells me that I should not send her epic entries very often. I wrote those last three posts all at once, e-mailed it in, and let my poor editor earn her paycheck.

For anyone who follows my Facebook page, you may have noticed that the introductory post to my rant did not go over well for me at work. Oops.

In the end, everyone is speaking to me again. I did not mean to suggest that everyone I work with has "lost their passion" and by "passion" I also don't necessarily mean passion for our individual jobs (i.e., nails, hair, massage). And also I need to mention that sometimes we lose our "passion" for coming to work every day for entirely justifiable reasons — and I'm certainly not holding this against any of my coworkers.

My point was that, after a conversation within the salon a few weeks ago, I got to thinking about how my own mood has been less than passionate lately and I find myself having to admit that I don't hang out at the salon when I'm not busy and I'm easily distracted from my work, while only a few months ago I was so into the biz I was in danger of having the BF tell me that I could just move into the salon if I wasn't going to start coming home before midnight!

So what changed?

Just a few weeks ago, I heard someone assert that when clients come to a salon and see empty stations, or stations that are rented, but never occupied, that it creates a notion in the mind of the client that this is a salon that is not doing well. Or that the salon workers are doing so well that maybe they don't need the business.

One way or the other, though, the point that penetrated my brain was that a successful booth rent salon requires a symbiotic relationship between each person working there, and how rarely we hear of a case that manages to maintain that balance, and how easy it is to get unbalanced, and how hard it can be to get the balance back. And how every salon needs someone to act as a fulcrum on which everyone else can balance. And my ultimate rant was the result of trying to conveyjust how hard it is to provide that kind of support, and hopefully, to offer a little perspective to everyone in the biz who has ever held their salon owner to this impossible standard. Which, quite frankly, at one point or another, is all of us.

So, like I was saying: The BF asked me the other day if I wanted to manage a salon or do nails.

My first reaction was to get all indignant. After all, I can do both! But he's right. (Shhhh, don't tell him I said that.) Despite the fact that it's entirely acceptable and very common for salon owners to also work in their salons as nail techs — or hair stylists, or estheticians, or whatever they did before they owned a salon — it does require an additional level of acrobatic skill, being both fulcrum for the rest of the staff to balance on, while also balancing on your own fulcrum! And let's face it, if I could do that, I'd join Cirque De Soleil. So, in the end, I had to concede that not only is another go at salon ownership possiblydecadesahead for me, but when I do give it another whirl, I'm going to have to seriously consider what role I hope to serve in the day-to-day workings of my own business.

None of which, of course, helps explain why I keep running home to update my Facebook page every time I have a couple of hours of down time in the middle of the day.