There are days when it's all I can do to keep nodding and smiling while trying to bite my tongue without it showing. Keep your head down, keep filing.

How do so many people who seek professional services get it in their heads that they know more about the service than the professional?

For instance, the lady who insisted that she wanted "gel" nails when she saw CND's Custom-Blended Manicure on “The View” (a hundred years ago or so, I think). She's still a client and she doesn't wear gel OR custom-blended acrylic but OH MY GOSH how that first appointment had me chewing a hole in my lip!

She had heard about the Custom-Blended Manicure and immediately decided that it was the perfect solution for her situation. She also decided that it was gel.

Never mind that I can rant for another seven years about the ATROCIOUS marketing campaign behind that product and the amazingly misleading information regarding it. Even the literature I had received from the company ran me through the emotional gamut as the shiny brochure promised me a revolutionary new product unlike anything ever introduced before ... to the heart-crushing realization by the last page that this was, in fact, just colored acrylic. So I can't blame the clients who heard about it and thought it must be something other than acrylic. But that first appointment with this client had me sputtering for clarity as I explained the differences: Did she want gel or a custom-blended acrylic overlay?

Or the lady who insisted that she was wearing fiberglass. It took me half an hour to convince her that I knew what I was talking about and that just because someone writes "fiberglass powder" on their jar does not make the substance inside that jar "fiberglass powder!"

And the purpose behind getting your nails filled is to prevent them from falling off! Falling off is NOT a sign that it's time to have them filled!

If you've had an allergic reaction to acrylic in the past, do not insist that I put acrylic on your nails. Do not tell me that it was the primer or the glue or the color of the powder or "just that one product."

And do not come in with a Band-Aid wrapped around your busted-up nail five weeks since you last saw the inside of a salon and tell me that you won't go back to that last nail tech because she "gave you a fungus." That's not a fungus and it didn't come from the last person who did your nails ... and if you wait that long to get a fill and seal a lifted nail with 27 layers of gel glue on my nails you'd better not tell the next tech that I gave you a "fungus" either!

It has been a very long couple of weeks. I am looking forward to IBS Las Vegas this weekend. If I can just get through the rest of this week.