Some barbershop happenings.

The other week at the one local barbershop in the one (college) town that I now live in, I go in and there's an expensive-looking leather-banded gold watch sitting out on top of a folded chair in the row of folding chairs against the one wall where customers used to sit and wait before the pandemic and everyone started waiting outside, and the one (scraggly-bearded) (white) (townie) barber who runs the place says that a(n Indian) student didn't realize that they don't take credit cards and he wouldn't leave his phone there for some reason, so he accepted the watch, and he was holding it there until he came back with the money.

He also said that he used to accept student IDs as collateral, but a few times people just left them there since they could get them replaced for free or for maybe like three dollars, and he could swear that one guy actually came in twice and did that, like a long time apart, but he actually did that twice, he thinks, and anyways, because of that he stopped doing that, now he needs like a driver's license or your phone or something.

"You should put the IDs people left up on the wall like a Wall of Shame," I was like.

"Eh," he was like, "I would hold them a week and then throw them out, when it was clear they weren't coming back."

Then, he was like, "And that would work for locals, they wouldn't want to see their face up there, but what do students care, they're here for two, three years and then they're gone."

He also said that earlier that day a guy came in and was complaining and complaining and complaining about his haircut and he went back and fixed it like five times, and he got the feeling that the guy was doing it so he could try to get money off the price, but finally after the fifth time he was like, "Okay, that's a free haircut for you," and then he told him never to come back.

"Indian?", I was like.

"Yeah," he was like, and then he said that sometimes people have this trick that they tried somewhere once and it worked out for them then, so they just keep on doing it everywhere they go to try to get stuff for free, and that was probably what that was.

. . .

(If that watch-band was leather, could a[n Indian] wear it? Maybe he was Pakistani or Bangladeshi or something like that, maybe Pakistani, since they seem richer and don't seem to have a thing about cows.)