by Peter Quinn
Customer: That was gas. Everyone was talking about it.
Barber: And did the bank know?
Customer: Sure they did! The students were going in asking if they could open a stripper account!
Christmas in Siberia
17 December 2009
I was feeling a bit down with the recession and the weather and with the ‘doomsday budget’ approaching, but my next customer was about to change my outlook.
Barber: Hi, what will we do today?
Customer: Cut it shorter than usual. I’ll be away for a few weeks for Christmas and the New Year.
Barber: No problem. Where are you off to?
Customer: Siberia.
Barber: Siberia! it must be extremely cold over there right now.
Customer: Yep, up to minus thirty. My wife is from there.
Barber: And here I was feeling sorry for myself because it won’t stop raining here. You wouldn’t be able to go out in temperatures that low, would you?
Customer: Well, my wife said we couldn’t go ice-skating if it gets below minus fifteen. It’s dangerous: last year a bus broke down travelling between two villages, and when the rescue party arrived everyone on the bus was dead.
Barber: I guess I’ve little reason to complain.
Customer: The economy is pretty bad too. It’s like going back in time when you arrive over there—like the sixties or seventies was here.
Barber: Well, I hope you enjoy Christmas over there.
Customer: Don’t worry about me. I’ll be out ice-skating!
My, how things have changed!
18 December 2009
Customer: We used to shop in New York; now we go to Newry!
Clothes and hair in the recession
19 December 2009
Customer (who works in the clothes trade): How’s business these days?
Barber: It’s not as good as it was over the last few years, but there are a lot of hairdressers’ and barber shops that are very quiet. It depends on the location, really.
Anyone in an industrial estate is very quiet. A lot of beauty salons are going to the wall. How are you finding it?
Customer: Very quiet. It’s very worrying.
Barber: On the radio they were talking to Louis Copeland, and he said people in clothes and hair trades always do well in a recession because everyone wants to look their best. In the boom years people dressed down, but in the recession they dress up.
Customer: Well, the eighties were like that. I worked through it, and it was very busy, but they were all dressing up for interviews. Everyone was on the dole and doing interviews all the time.
Barber: I remember those days, and that’s true. Most people getting a haircut would be going for an interview!
Customer: So that’s the difference, you see: no-one is doing interviews now!
Shopping online
24 December 2009
’Twas the day before Christmas . . . and the barber shop was stirring . . .
Customer: Did you get all your Christmas shopping done yet?
Barber: I did. I’ve been doing it online for the last few years. I’m not really into shopping: if I go into town I like to just ramble round and maybe have lunch or go for a coffee. I have to say, though, I find there’s less and less choice in the shops if you’re looking for something different. You know, most shops seem to be going more and more mainstream with their stock. Even in the bookshops there are certain sections that just disappeared in the last few years.
Customer: You’re looking for more specialist items then, yeah?
Barber: I am, and I always thought that when the web got going here shops would become more specialised, especially the smaller ones, in order to survive, but it hasn’t happened. Maybe the population is too small, as the specialist market would be smaller again. Do you shop online yourself?
Customer: I do. I really enjoy it, and then you get the package in the post. I’m like a kid opening it! Did you ever buy clothes online?
Barber: No, I haven’t. I’m put off by the thought of getting something and having to send it back if it’s too small or doesn’t fit right.
Customer: You should. I do. If you see something you like, try it on in a shop, get the right size and then order it online. Simple. Lots of people are doing it!
Barber: I never thought of that, but it must piss off the retailers. It’s funny too, you know, all the people who travel to Newry get grilled in the media, and all of us who buy most of our stuff online are left alone, like we are the unseen, unheard unpatriots!
Customer: Even when you tell people who are against Newry shopping that you shop online they don’t react to it. Is there an underlying attitude problem there? Like, online shopping is fine, but the others are killing the Southern retail market? ‘Cause we are spending our cash outside the country too!
Barber: You know, that’s a very good point!
New Year’s Eve in Dublin
2 January 2010
Customer: I was in town on New Year’s, and none of us realised it had been snowing outside. I guess we were too busy ringing in the new year. Anyway, when we came outside to get a taxi it was a whiteout—snow everywhere. We tried for a while, but there was no way to get a taxi, and we started walking. There were drunken people everywhere, slipping and sliding, and some fell badly. On the way up through Rathmines there was blood splattered on the footpaths where people had slipped, and we guessed they hit their heads—it was that bad! We passed small groups all gathered round helping people who had fallen, too wasted to get back up. There must have been some sore heads on New Year’s Day!
Barber: A doctor told me earlier he was working in A&E, and he said they were really busy with injuries from people falling on the ice. It must have been chaotic!
Customer: Well, I won’t be going into town for New Year’s next year. I’m fed up having to walk home!
More New Year’s disasters
3 January 2010
Customer: Man, it was hellish getting home from town on New Year’s. The taxis didn’t even come into town. There were girls in high heels pissed and trying to walk in the snow. They were falling everywhere, and it wasn’t like they could take off their heels, or they’d have ended up with frostbite!
Barber: I’ve heard so many stories about it. One lad told me he couldn’t walk up Portobello Bridge, and he saw someone take off their socks and put them over their shoes to get a grip on the snow, so he did the same and got over the bridge!
Christmas Eve on Grafton Street
4 January 2010
Customer: I was going up Grafton Street on Christmas Eve, and, outside Captain America’s, Bono, Damien Rice and Glen Hansard were busking. There was a huge crowd around them, but you could get close enough to see them. It was a real surprise. It’s on Youtube, but the quality isn’t great!
Serious lack of proper weather reports
5 January 2010
Customer: I can’t believe there’s no information on the radio or TV about the weather. I’m driving to Galway for New Year’s later, and I don’t know what the roads are like, or if I’ll even get there.
(Because of heavy snowfall and forecasts of temperatures anywhere between minus seven and minus thirteen, depending on which radio station you listen to.)
Barber: You know, when Henry played the handball, that’s all they talked about on the radio and TV for three days, when in the west, Carlow and Wexford— counties not even reported—they had some of the worst flooding in living memory!
Customer: Well, anyone I know who travelled to Galway that week couldn’t get past Ballinasloe. It was flooded and there were no reports on the main stations.
Barber: Did you try looking online for info?
Customer: Yeah, I did. I found a web site that had a forecast that read, ‘Weather likely to be wintry in nature!’
Barber: We just don’t have enough nerds in this country. If we did, all that information would be there!
We don’t do extremes!
> 6 January 2010
Customer: The schools aren’t open, some roads are gritted and some aren’t, the forecast is consistently wrong—man, we don’t do extremes in Ireland, whether it’s weather or the economy.
Barber: I saw a bumper sticker on a car recently that said, ‘Please send us another Tiger—we’ll look after this one!’
New car dealerships in Ireland
7 January 2010
Customer: My daughter went into the bank to get a loan for a car, and they asked her what sort of car she was looking for, so she said a Mini. She came home and told me they had a few Minis that she looked at. She picked the one she liked, and the bank gave her the loan. It was repossessed. They have so many now—some only a year or two old, low mileage—and she got a great deal!
Barber: I heard the insurance companies are doing something similar: if you write a car off they offer you a replacement—same model, same year. Not so good for the lads burning a car out in order to get the cash: they go down, expecting to get a cheque, and they get a replacement!
Customer: I wonder if the banks are selling off property too. I might look into that—see if I can pick up a cheap villa in Portugal.
Global warming
8 January 2010
Customer: I don’t really buy the whole global warming story. I did hear an interesting thing, though, about the idea that the Earth is heating up and that it heats up like any other organism, to burn off a disease—and in this case we’re the disease!
Barber: That’s weird. But you know the TV series ‘Lost’? The idea behind that is that there’s a reversal of the poles, and the ice caps melt, and basically everything is reversed: that’s why you have polar bears on a tropical island. See, in the future when the reversal happens you would—or could—have a tropical Ireland, and the Spanish would come here on holiday, making Bray a very good idea for future investment— just to keep it in mind. So the polar reversal or magnetic changeover is a theory that some scientists believe is cyclical. It makes you think, you know, maybe the Vikings invaded us all those years ago to take over our banana plantations. There was a desert in Antrim a long way back. That’s true—saw it on TV. Anyway, true or not, global warming is giving us a healthy awareness of the Earth and of looking after it in the future!
Hill-surfing
10 January 2010
This happened yesterday. We were very quiet in the morning because of the whiteout—snow everywhere. Even the staff from the local petrol station told us their pumps were frozen and that diesel was freezing in cars. It was the coldest I remember. Nice and fresh, though, when the sun came out . . .
Customer: I just saw some lads go past the window with surfboards!
Barber: Yeah, a few went by earlier. They’re going down to the hill. There were literally about eighty people down there last night sledging or going down the hill on plastic bags, but today the surfboards came out. Gas!
Technology
12 January 2010
Customer: My first proper PC had a 1.4 gig hard drive—a Compaq, I think. Now my phone has 8 gigs, which was only in the last ten years!
Barber: It’s amazing how fast technology is moving. I heard you can use an early Windows operating system on a mobile like that.
Customer: Even iPods have huge memory. Imagine someone told you ten or fifteen years ago that you could store your entire music collection on something smaller than a cigarette packet. You wouldn’t have believed it.
Driving in snow
19 January 2010
We had Polish people laughing at our attempts to drive in snow and ice, but here’s a new perspective on driving in bad conditions:
Customer: I used to live in LA, and they don’t get rain there very often—maybe once or twice a year—but sometimes they get rain that’s similar to heavy rain here in Ireland. But that’s rare—as rare as snow is here. When they get rain like that there are crashes everywhere, and people abandon their cars on the motorway! We used to laugh at the chaos, just like the Poles are laughing at us driving in snow. It’s just whatever you’re used to.
Barber: Or not used to!
Car park warning
20 January 2010
Recently I’ve been hearing stories told by those who had, without realising it, parked in someone’s space. The best of which was:
Customer: I parked in someone’s private space in a car park in town without realising, and when I came back my wipers were broken off the windscreen and shoved up my exhaust!
Barber: I still can’t believe someone would be so angry that they’d do that! I heard a few similar stories. It seems it was a trend for a while.
Frozen window-washers
21 January 2010
Customer: Still snowing, eh? The window-washers on my car are freezing up, and I couldn’t clear the windscreen. Very dangerous, that, especially now with all the slush on the motorways. The trucks spray your windscreen with slush and dirt.
Barber: Tell me about it! The trucks are doing almost a hundred kilometres per hour on the motorways, and, when they go past, your windscreen is covered in grime and slush in seconds. One lad told me he did fifty miles before his washers would work.
Customer: Well, I went into about four garages on the way home the other night to get a windscreen-washer liquid that had antifreeze in it, and everywhere was sold out, so I remembered a cheap bottle of vodka I got for Christmas. I’d never have opened it, so I filled the windscreen-washer with it. And guess what! It works!
Iris Robinson and Ikea
23 January 2010
Customer: What do Iris Robinson and Ikea have in common?
Barber: No idea.
Customer: One dodgy screw and the whole cabinet falls apart!
Things may be getting better!
24 January 2010
The car parks are filling up. People are beginning to spend again. Phones are ringing in offices. Payments are arriving in businesses without the accounts department having to ring and remind or demand. Delivery drivers are working late. Hey, I even had to oil my clippers a few times today. Since the snow cleared, people are spending again. Was it all a confidence thing? Let’s hope!
No they’re not!
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 . . .
BMWs don’t do snow!
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!
Doomsday radio
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.
Rain sensors on cars
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!
Extreme sports
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!
Car loan, anyone?
