There may be no place on this Earth where I am more popular than the Hair Cuttery three miles from my house in Virginia.

This morning I was sitting in the parking lot waiting for the place to open, and the woman who cuts my hair most often spotted me and waved as she exited her car to walk inside.  By contrast, when I’m walking down the sidewalk toward work, I can easily blow past one of my coworkers and not even realize it (sorry y’all).

Once inside, I’m usually greeted with smiles and kind words from whomever is working — a combination of “honey,” “sweetie” and “you haven’t been to see us in a while.”

It’s important to note I’ve been to multiple locations over the years, and while there were some nice people say in Jacksonville, none of those other experiences has come close to this one.

I think it helps that I’m there first thing in the morning when there’s rarely anyone else, plus having spent many years in customer service I tend to have good connections with others in those kinds of positions.

Of course I’ll never be more popular than with my longest tenured hair cutter.  That would be my mom.

At some point during my early-ish elementary school days we got a set of clippers at home, which made perfect sense with four kids around whose hair had the audacity to never stop growing.  Mostly this was an amazing development, leaving us only to ask (usually after building a coalition) and mom would soldier through giving us all a trim.

But there was one time where everything didn’t go as smoothly as intended.  I was in the fourth grade rocking something like a #4 on the sides and back of my head and a #7 on the top.

The responsibility of the first kid in line was to spread out a shower curtain on the floor, plop a chair on top, and open up the case containing the cutting supplies.  Then we sat down, put in our order and let the magic happen.

Somehow during all of this my mom and I got distracted, and by the time the clippers hit my head it was too late to catch our mistake.  Neither one of us put on the #7 guard, meaning my hair was instead being given a nice, close #0.  There’s no going back at that point.  She had to shave my entire head basically down to nothing, leaving only a tiny bit of fuzz.

In high school, this probably would have been a big deal.  But as a fourth grader it took about seven seconds at school for people to ask what happened and then forget.

We were left with an important new step in the hair cutting process — putting the first guard on myself each time — as well as a memory both my barber and I still laugh about today.