Part 2: Canceling An Appointment With Your Waxer Might Be Deadly.

OK Let me start by saying that if you don't know what I am talking about you must read Part 1 the original story for clarification.

This post is the continuation of my epic battle with the worlds most (cough) annoying client.

6 MONTHS AFTER PART 1

I thought I would never see her again but there she is here is the waiting room. I look at my chart of clients for the day and I recognize the name but don't know why. Suddenly our eyes meet.

Her eyes search mine and she wonders how she knows me. After a moment her pupils flicker with recognition. Its an instant staring match and I wonder how she found me. Then I realize that the fake spa name I have is the culprit. She has no idea my spa name is Savana. She's come to the spa hoping to get a facial.

She only knows me as Rachel.

I release her eyes from mine and go into the back. I plead with my boss to have someone else take her. Nobody is available. I don't want to give this woman a facial because I know she won't tip me and also probably won't want to pay $125 for it.

So the client reluctantly comes back into my room and starts to complain about why she can't have the facial. She tells me she did not know how much it was and they booked it wrong. I realize she is trying to negotiate with me. We charge half price for cancellations when clients cancel within 24 hours or the appointment.

I tell her she is welcome to leave and I will allow them to cancel the appointment. Her jaw drops. She really thought she had me.

Well that was easy.

Canceling An Appointment With Your Waxer Might Be Deadly

If you know anything about me you'll know I started my first business out of my home in San Francisco.

I get this new client who is a total pain and she wants me to recommend skincare to her while waxing her. The funny thing is she wanted to talk about the fluff that she can buy in the drugstore. So I am trying to explain to her that because I am an esthetician I never go to the drugstore and could not tell her about the skincare there. I would never buy that stuff. Lets face it, if that stuff actually worked, I would not have a job.

After we finish her full body wax for only $100 (hey she was a size zero) she proceeds to eat up my time by repeating her request for drugstore skincare recommendations. Annoying!!!

In the following months she booked three more appointments but never showed up for them. She was so inconsiderate. I started to feel like a loser. Who did she think she was messing with?

She would beg me to see her at 7am before she had to go to work. Like an idiot I had allowed her to push me to make the appointment again and again. She would always cancel last minute after I had set-up for her and heated the wax for over an hour. This is one of the reasons why spas ask for your credit card number before taking appointments. I was really getting fed up with this and did not have a credit card terminal.

She was just pushy and I was sick of it. My time is worth money and she was wasting it.

Its times like this that I just wanna "throw down" as they say. I start to fantasize about buying brass knuckles (pink ones of course cuz I'm a lady) and beating her. I imagine a scene like "spa people" meet "Fight Club".

Pink boxing gloves maybe?

Hey lets elaborate on this... Imagine me killing her, I mean actually killing her over missed appointments. I could see it now on the news. They come to my house, arrest me, find her DNA in my wax pot and haul my sorry arse off to jail. Ok,ok I'm just kidding I am seriously over it.

So lets get back to what happened. The fourth time she booked an appointment I slept in. I figured she would not show. She showed! She knocked on my door for over 20 mins while I lay in bed watching TV. Over the next few months she called me several times apologizing and asking me if she had offended me in some way. I never called her back.

Payback.

Body Treatments Are Not Free.

I used to give this guy a full body wax. He was a guy from San Francisco and probably in his mid 40's. I can usually do a full body wax including bikini area in a reasonable amount of time but this guy was difficult.

I've learned that there are people who have realized that there are ways to score spa freebies if they play their cards right. For example when I waxed his back and the back of his legs he would always ask me to do a partial butt wax. Now here is where I draw the line with men. Anything hanging out of the undies is fine. But there will be no butt waxing. I don't care if your a swimmer THAT falls into the Boy-Zillian category.

This guy also told me that he broke out from waxing and was wondering if I had anything for that. I said yes and recommend the proper products. He never bought the products but asked me to apply something after waxing to help with the breakouts. Somehow I let him pressure me into apply a anti-inflammatory clay to his entire body. Between cleaning the residual wax off and applying the clay we are talking about an extra 45 minutes of time. In my world that is just not acceptable. Time is money is this business. Every time this guy came in it was the same story and every time he would plead with me for this little extra waxing and his mud treatment.

Finally I put a note in his file asking the receptionist to bill him an extra $150 the next time he booked with her on the phone. Hey its the going rate and a girls gotta eat! She was to inform him of this before making the appointment. The next time he called, after hearing this, he decided not to book the appointment.

Good Riddance..

An Inconveinent Wax

I had this French client who used to come in and ask me to do a full leg wax. She was in her 60's and had no hair on her legs. That's right you read correctly...no hair. Not only did she insist on getting her legs waxed, but she wanted me to go over each area twice, she said she could feel the hair.

I did not feel any hair.

This woman is fruit loops I thought to myself each and every time I went through this debacle. For those of you who are not waxers let me explain how it works. In order to wax properly we need to be able to see where we have not waxed. Hair would be a good indication of this because it tells us where to apply the wax. As we wax we can clearly see the next hairy patch needing removal. I promise you this is the schematic that all good waxers use. Its quite orderly.

Now I have 20/20 vision, x-ray vision in fact. So if I can't see hair nobody can. Because it was so difficult to deal with her "hair dis-morpha" I told the spa that I would not be seeing her again. I was losing money on her because she was taking up too much of my schedule. I worked on straight commission so time is money.

Lack of money talks and has a tendency to gossip, actually.

I forget how they handled it. What I remember is a woman in a heavy French accent screaming, "let me see Savana now" while pounding her fist on the counter.

I was sneaking out the back.

Au Revoir....