Short Back and Sides (5 page)

You just never know!

1 July 2009

Customer:
Girls are outperforming boys in exams and at college this last ten years. It seems they're more suited to being academics. The boys just can't get down to it the same way.

Barber:
Girls just seem to realise what's expected of them while the lads even at Junior Cert age are still dreaming of being football stars!

2 July 2009

Customer:
I must say I really admire Brian O'Driscoll. I mean, he gets injured repeatedly. Sometimes he gets terrible injuries, and then when he plays his next game he goes at it without concern, putting himself in harm's way time after time, like he'd never been injured. He must have no fear.

Barber:
It's impressive, all right. After the Rugby World Cup I heard a doctor say the injuries players get at that level are similar to the injuries he'd normally see treating patients who'd been in a car crash!

4 July 2009

Customer:
My young lad just started working in Tesco for the summer.

Barber:
Tesco? What's he doing there?

Customer:
Learning Polish!

5 July 2009

After the film
The Wind That Shakes the Barley
came out, older customers who had seen it began to open up, and some of them told me stories they'd long forgotten.

Customer
(a great customer who was in his late eighties when he told me this): My friends and I were coming home through the [Dublin] city centre. We were all about eleven or twelve. We had been collecting periwinkles near Ringsend, and we didn't notice the time. Back then everyone had to be off the streets by nine o'clock, and the Black and Tans were out enforcing the curfew. We gathered so many periwinkles that we had to put them onto the front of our jumpers and then hold the bottom of the jumper up in front of us like a pouch. Two Black and Tans saw us and asked us what we had in our jumpers. We were terrified. ‘Periwinkles,' we told them, and they got annoyed because they didn't know what they were. The Tans ordered us to spread them out on the street, and we emptied them all out of our jumpers onto the ground. They had never seen or heard of cockles, and I suppose they thought we had something hidden amongst them. They let us go, but we were lucky—we could have been killed.

Barber:
It's hard to even imagine what life must have been like back then!

6 July 2009

I've heard this so often that it's beyond coincidence. As soon as I mention that the car has broken down or that the mobile phone is acting up, most every customer will say, ‘Only one more to go, then' or ‘Well, that's two out of three.' It does seem to apply to major disruptions in our lives—like deaths in the circle of friends and family—that, within a few days, or the space of a month at most, three large life interruptions occur consecutively. Perhaps this unquantified law of the social world is a close relative of Murphy's Law?

7 July 2009

Customer:
That's a very nice cut-throat razor. Is it an antique?

Barber:
It is. I don't use it now. It's just for show. It's Victorian, I think.

Customer
(holding up my takeaway coffee): And this coffee cup?

Barber
: I'd say this is Cardboardian!

8 July 2009

Customer:
Had the kids round at my dad's house at the weekend. He lost all his savings in the crash, so he's a bit down. He was counting out his loose change for the kids, and I was standing beside him when he says to them, ‘Now off you go down to the shops and get yourselves some penny sweets. Or, if you want,' he says under his breath, ‘you could buy most of my bank shares.'

9 July 2009

Customer:
I was reading a book Alice Cooper wrote about golf! Can you believe back in the eighties Iggy Pop and Cooper used to quietly slip out of rock and roll parties before midnight so they could be up early and be out on the golf course by 7 a.m. They played thirty-six holes at the crack of dawn so no-one would see them. At that time they feared it would damage their ‘wild men of rock, serial killer' image.

Barber:
How did they get into golf?

Customer:
Cooper was drinking heavily in the early eighties, and he almost died. He was drinking whiskey for breakfast and a case of beer to follow! So he quit the drink and started playing golf. He says it saved his life. Don't know how Iggy started, though!

10 July 2009

Customer:
I've had a terrible few weeks! My mate's put an ad in the men-seeking-men classifieds online, and they put my phone number up too!

Barber:
That's mad. Did anyone ring you?

Customer:
The phone never stopped at night. Two, three in the morning, lads asking if I was available! It was a nightmare! When I told my friends, they couldn't stop laughing. They thought it was a great laugh! The feckers!

11 July 2009

Customer
(a barman): An old man who was drinking at the bar handed me his newspaper and asked me if I'd look up the death notices for a Duffy, so I look through it quickly. ‘No,' I say to him, ‘there's no Duffy here.' ‘Are you sure?' he says. ‘Yes,' I said, handing him back his paper. ‘Good,' said the oul' fella. ‘I didn't know if I was dead or alive when I woke up this morning!'

12 July 2009

Customer:
Women? They're all great, until you get to know them!

13 July 2009

Barber:
How are you getting on?

Customer
(sounding hopeless): Surviving. Sure there's no use in complaining. Sure no-one would listen anyway. At least I'm still breathing!

Barber:
Did you have your money in bank shares, then?

14 July 2009

Barber:
Where are you from?

Customer:
Mauritius. It's an island in the Indian Ocean.

Barber:
Mauritius—that's like a paradise over there. Why did you come to Ireland, of all places?

Customer:
I like the weather.

Barber:
You like the weather? Are you serious?

Customer:
Yeah, it's far too hot over there, and I don't have to worry about that here!

Barber:
You're mad, you are!

15 April 2009

Barber:
How are you?

Customer:
Better than the small farmer!

16 July 2009

Customer:
There's been a lot of crashes on the roads involving the Polish lately!

Barber:
Yeah, there's been a few, all right.

Customer:
And you know why, don't you?

Barber:
No, why?

Customer:
Ah, they drink and drive!

17 July 2009

Yesterday was the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, which came up in the shop and led to this comment . . .

Customer:
During the space race they needed to invent a pen that could write in zero gravity, and it also had to write upside down. America spent millions of dollars and years of research making the pen while the Russians used a pencil!

20 July 2009

Customer:
Whenever something big happens in the world, like the death of a celebrity, a plane crash—you know, an event that gets the headlines—there are relentless amounts of jokes being texted from one mobile to another.

Barber:
A lot of people have mentioned it in the barber shop over the years, and people have often said that no-one knows who writes these jokes or where they come from originally. We just receive them and forward them to friends!

Customer:
Well, there is a theory that there's a think-tank of specially chosen lads who all rush into a room as soon as there's major world news breaking, and they write these jokes and forward them to a circle of friends, who then forward the messages on to their friends, and the snowball begins to roll down the hill. The mobile-phone companies who stand by and watch the money roll in probably have them in an office somewhere, sworn to secrecy.

Barber:
Well, if it's true, they're getting lazy, because the jokes—as a customer mentioned recently—are quite similar to jokes used for previous world news events—just the names or details are changed. Good theory, though!

21 July 2009

Barber
(to an Australian customer): I bet you miss surfing and Vegemite?

Customer:
Miss surfing? No, most weekends I go down to the west coast and surf. It's really good here.

Barber:
The surfing must be catching on here: lots of people are telling me they surf down the west!

Customer:
I bet you didn't know you held the record for the most people surfing a wave at the same time: forty-four altogether! Back in May 2006.

By the way, I looked it up, and it's true. I also found that, in 1979, the Pro/Am Surfing World Championships were held in Easky, Co. Sligo!

23 July 2009

Barber:
Are you off today?

Customer:
No, just on a lunch break.

Barber:
Oh, where do you work?

Customer:
Just in an office up the road.

Barber:
What sort of work do you do?

Customer:
What is this, the sixty-second quiz?

24 July 2009

A customer was talking about Admiral William Brown (from Foxford in Co. Mayo), who is the father of the Argentine navy. So then he (the customer) tells me that a huge number of Irish people emigrated to Argentina. Not trusting the information, I looked it up, and here are some facts from the Diaspora web site:

In the latter half of the nineteenth century approximately 45,000 Irish people arrived in Argentina, some 20,000 of whom settled there, with most of the rest moving to the United States.

Today in Latin America some 300,000 to 500,000 people are estimated to have some Irish ancestry, most of them living in Argentina, with lesser numbers in Central America, Uruguay and Brazil.

Who would have thought it!

25 July 2009

Customer
(from New Zealand): Bodyboards—they're deadly dangerous. Do you know what we call them at home?

Barber:
No, I've no idea.

Customer:
Shark biscuits, mate!

Barber:
Why do they call them that?

Customer:
Because of the number of sharks that attack people on them. See, your hands and legs are paddling along, and from beneath the shark looks up and thinks it's a big turtle and goes in for his tea. So that's why we call them shark biscuits.

26 July 2009

In the shop one very busy Saturday afternoon a guy comes in to queue and sees a lad he knows having his hair cut. A conversation begins . . .

Customer 1:
Hey! Saw you at the party the other night!

Customer 2:
Yeah, great one, wasn't it?

Customer 1:
Who was that dog-ugly bird you were talking to all night?

Everyone in the shop started laughing.

Customer 2:
That was my girlfriend.

You could have heard a pin drop . . .

27 July 2009

Barber:
Is it just an Irish thing? Why are we so hesitant to complain in restaurants when food is not right? People think if you send a steak back to the kitchen the chefs will throw it on the floor, kick it around a bit—if you're lucky—toss it back in the pan for a few minutes and then send it back out to you! Apart from being the only one at the table to return your plate, and everyone else in your company having a cringe moment: ‘Oh, for God's sake, don't be so fussy. My food is fine,' and so on . . . Have you ever heard of anything like that going on?

Customer
(a chef): Yeah, I've seen it being done! There are restaurants where you can be sure that this type of attitude is not tolerated, but there are places where it can happen.

Barber:
Are you serious?

Customer:
Well, say you're the chef and you're very busy. You have cooked a steak and sent it out of the kitchen, and it arrives back in at the behest of some gobshite whose staple recession diet is cornflakes and petrol-station sandwiches. The customer is telling an experienced, fully qualified chef that what he has prepared is not to their liking. And, hey, the kitchen staff have a quick game of steak football before it goes back in the pan. It depends on what sort of place you're in.

Barber:
So what would you do if your food wasn't up to standard?

Customer:
I'd get up and walk out of the restaurant.

28 July 2009