Short Back and Sides (11 page)

25 January 2010

A lot of customers were talking about the way things had turned around, but it was only for a short while. It turns out that the mini-boom was the result of everyone getting paid after Christmas for the first time in six weeks. This, added to the effect of being snowed in for days, meant that everyone went out and spent for a few days. Back to the recession . . .

26 January 2010

Customer:
I've had to leave the BMW at home. I'm driving the wife's car instead: the Beemer is hopeless in this weather.

Barber:
Yeah, Mercs too. There are lots of them sitting in driveways, covered in snow, that haven't been driven since New Year's.

Customer:
It's mad paying forty grand plus for a car and then finding it can't hold its own in the snow. It's the rear-wheel drive: no weight over the wheels.

Barber:
I used to have a Volkswagen Beetle, and there was a similar problem with the front, so people put a sack of potatoes or a concrete block in the boot. I'd imagine that would work for a rear-wheel drive car!

Customer:
Would you feck off with your sack of potatoes!

27 January 2010

Customer:
I've taken Newstalk and RTE1 off the presets on my radio. I can't listen to that doomsday journalism any more.

Barber:
I can't count the number of people who said they've stopped listening to those stations. The radio would have you feeling suicidal.

28 January 2010

We were talking about rain sensors on cars when a customer told us:

Customer:
Yeah, they're good, but I had a new Mercedes there two years ago, and my wife took it to the garage and went through a car wash. She didn't know there was a rain sensor, and the wipers were ruined. They came on full when the water was spraying on the windscreen. Then the brushes started, and they were mangled!

29 January 2010

Customer:
I was on holiday in Rio and did some paragliding with friends who do it regularly. We went up the mountain, and near the top we met some people coming back down saying there was a storm coming in. We saw nothing only blue sky, so, as we were almost at the top, we decided to jump. There were four of us, and we were all in the air in minutes out over the sea. It was beautiful, but then dark clouds appeared in the sky. I knew they were dangerous, so I started descending to lose some height. One of the lads was up quite high still, and the cloud started to suck him up.

Barber:
How do you mean, ‘it sucked him up'?

Customer:
The storm clouds you get in tropical countries are like a vacuum, and they suck air up through them. The clouds trap all the moisture in the air. They suck through, and the moisture freezes, and later it'll fall as hailstones. So my mate was being pulled up towards the cloud. He would've died if he went into it, because the hailstones inside are like rocks, and they're in the cloud flying around—you'd be battered to death. So he cut his canopy straps and came flying past me and on down into the sea. He survived, but it was as close as you'd ever want to come!

31 January 2010

A customer in the second-hand car trade told me today that they had a busy week—the busiest Saturday in ten years, to quote him exactly. He said the banks were beginning to give out car loans again!

1 February 2010

Customer:
I tried to get a bank loan of €100,000 to expand my business. The company is doing well through the recession, and I need to grow the business. But my application was turned down by the bank! A few weeks later I applied for a loan for a car—an expensive car. I asked for €120,000, and the bank approved the loan!

2 February 2010

Customer:
I was in the Aran Islands recently on a break, and one night in a pub we asked the barman if we could get a taxi home. He called out to a man sitting at the back of the pub: ‘These people are looking for a lift.' ‘No problem,' the man said. ‘I'll be ready in a few minutes.' He went back to talking to some friends. Anyway, we finished our drinks and went outside, but there was no car in the street. Puzzled, I asked the driver, who was just coming out the door, where the car was. He had a big grin on his face as he walked round by the side of the pub! ‘Here she is,' he said loudly as he reappeared with a horse and cart. We got into the cart, and he told us there was a blanket in the back that we could throw over our legs if we were cold!

3 February 2010

Barber:
I haven't seen you for a while. Your hair has gotten very long.

Customer:
Ah, I had a rough few weeks there. My brother committed suicide.

Barber:
God, I'm really sorry to hear that.

Customer:
No need: it was the best thing he ever did.

4 February 2010

A customer came into the shop with the longest matted curly hair I've ever seen, when another customer, who was waiting, shouted out, ‘Are you getting that mop cut or are you just getting an estimate?'

10 February 2010

Barber:
The prices that hotels are offering are great: it's cheaper to stay in town now than to get a taxi home if you live outside Dublin.

Customer:
I've seen them. Sure at those prices we should rent our houses out and move into a hotel!

12 February 2010

Customer:
Ah, I think George was naïve to think that his ideas would be listened to.

Barber:
Did you hear the rumours that he left because the expenses cut was coming? And some think he bailed to get Charlie Bird's job in Washington!

Customer:
Well, whatever the reason, I imagine he thought he was welcomed into the Fine Gael party because he had a rare perspective. He had ideas, and they were relevant.

Barber:
So why didn't they fast-track his top-ten list to the boardroom meetings? Why else would they bring him on board?

Customer:
Unfortunately, Fine Gael didn't see it like that. A celebrity like George brings a lot of kudos to the party. I think that's all they wanted from him. So I'm hoping George Lee will publish some of his ideas so we can see what went into Enda's wastepaper basket—if they even got that far. That would be a real embarrassment for Fine Gael if there were good ideas in there.

Barber:
And I thought we were moving forward for a moment . . .

16 February 2010

Barber:
Wow, this is a challenge!

Customer:
Tell me about it! I've got so many cowlicks my mother says I was born in a cow shed!

19 February 2010

Customer:
Did you see O'Dea on the news last night?

Barber:
No, I missed that. What was he saying?

Customer:
It was very funny. The reporters met him outside on the street, and he started off saying he wasn't pushed, that he had resigned of his own free will. So the reporters were taunting him a little to get a reaction out of him, and one asked him again if Cowen had asked him to leave, and he responded by saying, ‘No, as I said, I decided for the good of the country that I would step down, otherwise it could have brought the Government down, and we can't have that right now, so I did it in the best interests of the country!' Hilarious. But the best bit was at the end when a reporter asked him if he thought he had been unfairly treated by the party, and he said, off the top of his head, ‘Of course I do. I stood by other party members when they were in trouble, and they did much worse things than I did.'

Barber:
I can't believe he said that. So he's telling us he was loyal even to the point of protecting the guilty. Good job he's gone, then.

Customer:
He was gas, though. I remember a friend of mine went to a fancy-dress party with a pair of the Marx Brothers' glasses, with the fake nose and moustache. Do you remember them?

Barber:
I do. They sell them in joke shops. I haven't seen them for a while, though.

Customer:
They're the ones. Well, he wore them, and he had a toy shotgun, and he went as Willie O'Dea. He looked just like him! It was just after the picture of him in the front page of the paper looking down the barrel of a rifle!

2 March 2010

Customer:
I saw a blacked-out, taped-up Porsche 997 and a Boxster outside a pub in Mayo. They were disguised, so you couldn't see the new shape. It was a few years ago now, but it's something I won't forget. It was months before the cars went on sale. The drivers were obviously having some lunch in the pub—it was in the middle of nowhere!

Barber:
I heard Toyota does that too to set up the suspension. Funny the things you happen upon in this country!

3 March 2010

Customer:
I bleached my hair at home and left it on too long, and I hate it. It's so white and curly—it's like Super Noodles.

Barber:
It really is!

4 March 2010

Customer:
It's incitement to revolution, it is! Bertie should be keeping his head down. Unheard and unseen, I tell you! He's got no shame. Do you remember what he said to the economists who warned about the bubble bursting? ‘I don't know how people who engage in that don't commit suicide,' he said. Haughey was right when he said Bertie was the most cunning of all.

Barber:
He did say that. And, of all people, Charlie would have known.

Customer:
Did you see his daughter in the weekend supplement full-page spread, lying across a chaise longue in a ball gown or something? Looks like it was taken in window of the Shelbourne Hotel. Had noone in the paper the sense to stop that story in a recession? We need to get the French over and bring a guillotine or two over with them so we can revolt. They'll show us what to do! We'll take Enda Kenny out too; no-one will vote for Fine Gael until they get him out. They need to put Richard Bruton in there instead. Kenny is a clown.

Barber:
A lot of people have said that they'd vote for Fianna Fáil again rather than have Enda Kenny as Taoiseach. Maybe they'll leave Kenny in so they won't win and won't have to clean up the mess.

6 March 2010

Customer:
I can't believe the price of petrol lately. Last year, when it started going up, everyone was talking about it, but this year I haven't heard anyone mention it on the radio or on TV.

Barber:
I know, it's €1.32 in some places now.

Customer:
It's like they're watering it down. A full tank doesn't last at all.

Barber:
A customer told me the filling stations that advertise that they use an additive that cleans your engine are actually diluting the fuel with the additive, as it's cheaper and means they get more profit!

Customer:
Well, I can believe it.

7 March 2010

I've been hearing from customers how difficult it's been to get a mortgage. It's nigh on impossible, it seems, since the global downturn, and then I heard this . . .

Customer:
I work in construction, and the only clients we've had in the last few months for extensions or new house builds that are getting mortgages all had one thing in common: they all work in the bank!

Barber:
That would suggest that their bank jobs are secure?

Customer:
God only knows, but one client, who had a well-paid, secure job for twenty-six years, couldn't get the loan he needed to extend his house.

13 March 2009

Customer:
Why does the same truck pick up the brown and black bins?

14 May 2009

Customer:
You must end up with lots of hair clippings at the end of the day. Is there anything you can do with them?

Barber:
Well, not really. The cuttings are too short to be used for wigs.

Customer:
You could use the hair to clone customers.

Barber:
That's something that never crossed my mind, strangely enough.

Customer:
You could, you know. Not all of them, mind you—just the good ones.

16 March 2010

Customer:
I was at home the other night. It was late, and I saw two people outside walking or sneaking across the garden. I said nothing to my wife. I didn't want to frighten her. I went out of the room where we were watching TV and rang the guards. I told them that there were two lads outside in the garden, that we were alone in the house and that we live in a detached house in the country. The guard on the phone told me they were too busy to call out. They told me that I should bolt the door and that they'd come out when they had time. I took their advice and bolted the door.