Reality, part two.

These days, I find myself in an untenable financial situation.

I have a job, working at a nice private salon, where the boss is great, and I have almost limitless possibilities for growth… if we had a clientele. People come in here and there, and I do have my own clients, but they are few compared to the availability I have open on my schedule.

I have worked at all of the commercial salons available in this city - I won’t do Supercuts, Fantastic Sams or Great Clips. I can’t stand behind a chair everyday doing 20 $8 haircuts on the unwashed masses.

The pay is shitty, the stylists that work there are generally unintelligent, unskilled bitches, and the environment isn’t conducive to positive mental or physical health.

I know it is a job, and it is in my field, but those chains are concerned with quantity over quality, something that is the diametrical opposite of my work ethic.

Imagine Rick Bayless working at Taco Bell, or Bobby Flay working at Burger King.

I have been searching for a second job doing anything, and I have discovered that I am unqualified to do about everything. In those formative years where young people work in bars and restaurants, do internships, and generally develop a varied skillset, I already had a vocation and career doing hair.

In this job market, in Chicago, hell - in general, experience is required. I am not qualfied to bus tables, much less work in an office or specialty store of some kind.

I applied at over 30 salons after I left the HC, and only two deigned to interview me. I also applied for at least twice as many non-salon positions, with nary a call-back. I ended up working at Asha, but I was never a good fit with that place.

The people that work there tend to go out to cocktails after work with their girlfriends, wearing 5-inch stilettos, sexy designer clothing. They spend their income on fripperies and doodads.

I always felt like an outsider and a second-class citizen, never quite in on anything, and not really worthy or anyone’s time.

The pay was also shitty - they grossly misrepresented the facts and figures when I was hired and then lied about it to my face when I called them on it, they are most assuredly are violating federal minimum wage standards, they really don’t support new staff at all, and I was miserably unhappy.

Unfortunately, unless you walk into a lucky situation with pre-existing salon clients, you don’t make a lot of money. And it can take 6 months to 2 years to really have a solid client-base and a fat paycheck.

The salon where I work is a newer salon, starting out with a teensy established clientele, in a location that has largely been ignored by anyone but the employees of the hospital across the street. Someday we will own the people at that hospital. But for now we settle for the slow build.