A few weeks back a fellow tells me he got haircut for 500 birr. Five hundred birr! I pay a little less half of that and I still feel I’m being ripped off! Where the hell do people get that sort of money! A stupid question? Maybe; “What was special about a 500-birr haircut?” you might ask. With no hesitation he says, “Absolutely nothing!” Absolutely nothing and he still squanders 500 birr! Why didn’t you go another barber shop where the pay was more reasonable? He didn’t have an answer. Maybe he was trying to impress some Cleopatra. 500 birr for a haircut where the barber shop offers no kingly treatment or something like that.
“You should try it one of these days, just for fun!” he might say. Just for the fun! If I bleed five-hundred birr for a haircut fun is the last thing that comes to my mind!
At the barber’s all news is BREAKING! Of course, they don’t pull everything out of the thin air. They get the ‘news skeletons’ from clients and put flesh on them. Bingo! There we’ve a perfectly structured narrative! Give the guys the benefit of the doubt. I mean, pitting flesh on skeletons demands some brain work! And aren’t brains what we seem to be cutely short of! “The recent floods are the signs of end times!”
“Really!”
“Really, and everything, including us, would be wiped out within minutes.” Who cares if the dinosaurs are rolling over in their graves with laughter! At least theirs wasn’t over in minutes. Barbers tell stories with confidence and authoritative tone. If they say ‘doomsday’ is around the corner better go home and pack up, if you’ve anywhere to go that is! Believe me, if and when the \end times\ come some of us would have “…somewhere else to go! We don’t say this world of ours is weird for nothing!”
Can the barber kindly reveal his sources? The last thing any veteran client of the barber would ask is, “What are your sources?” I mean the guy is doing service to your otherwise very ordinary looks and offending him wouldn’t be anything less than a cardinal sin. One thing you don’t ask your barber is to reveal his sources. This is not about the ‘style book’ of some newsroom. You go in like a Rip Van Winkle badly in need of a haircut and you come out like someone badly in need of some, what else, hair! In the process, your current affairs knowledge goes a few notches up.
Another visit to your barber’s; It is going to be an interesting forty-five minutes or so with your
Look, if you ask me, I prefer barbers as sources rather than so-called analysis of half and badly baked politicians and so-called activists. I mean listening to them, researches would one day discover, gives you symptoms of Alzheimer’s or something equally scary.I prefer the innocence of the barbers than the snobbery and arrogance those who think they, and only they, hold the magic wand to everything.
Seldom do you hear Barbers complain about the small fare clients are charged like cabbies do. (You can give a cabbie a hundred birr more than the actual fare and he’d still be complaining. “The fuel prices are high; it is easier to buy a new car than spare parts…!” The day cabbies stop talking 24/7 and ever complaining that, maybe, would be the day when sanity in the cab business starts its comeback!) Once the price is set barbers go about their work which officially is cutting hair and unofficially providing current affairs’ updates wouldn’t care whether you believe or not. They provide you, of course free, with the real juice. And yes, you tell what to your friends. Yes, you quote the barbers as your sources and practically no one scoffs. Legitimacy, with no strings attached! Barbers usually don’t try to convince you. They don’t say something like, “You’re with us, or you’re with them. No middle ground!” They don’t say, “Play second fiddle to my music or else you wouldn’t know what hit you.”
Your Internet is down and you aren’t getting fresh news? Don’t worry! I’ll tell you what to do. Just go to the good old barber and you’d get news, and analysis, the big networks haven’t yet discovered! Isn’t to think of beating the media heavy lifters to the ‘freshest news’ out there! That’s it. Oh; you’ve had a haircut a fortnight ago and there is practically no hair on your head? Again, don’t worry! The barber would get something to cut; on your barren head, too! I tell you those guys are one hell of a clever lot. What an interesting species! The barber would tell you what’s happening in the Ukraine-Russia mayhem; he’d tell you the next plans of President Donald Trump, plans even Trump himself might not know; he’d even tell you which big boss is suspected of throwing himself on the wrong beds.
While we’re at it, several months back I accompany a friend to his barber’s. There was a guy who won’t have drawn a good first look let alone a second getting a haircut. This guy has taken of his jacket and what do we see glued to his right hip; a gun. A gun! Yes, a damned ugly-looking toy, the last thing you want to set your eyes on; and at the barbers’ of all places! Oh yes, all the signs were that it was intentional. The guy, by flashing his ‘killing machine’ so openly, was telling everyone who calls the shots! Fall in line, or else! The barber shop was so quite the creepiest chapter of a Stephen King story wouldn’t have been scarier.
Think about it, barbers seem to be more info-friendly than most of us, even the news crowd! I really mean that! At the barber’s there are no ‘restrictions’ or ‘political correctness’ (sometimes why do I feel this thing about political correctness goes a little too far preventing you from calling something what it should, even must, be called.) Every other guy who thinks they have beans to spill, be it about political intrigues and fall outs, marital infidelities or intrigues, would unload them at the barber’s. Of course, if everything barbers tell us sees the light of day, nothing short of a Moses who’d take us across the troubled waters would ensure our survival as the descendants of the Adam fellow. But even that doesn’t diminish their impacts on the ‘dissemination’ of info.
By the way at the barbers’ the ‘news’ is already verified and final! Any other version, even from the news-makers themselves, would be ‘fake news.’ Who the hell do you think you are to doubt the barber?
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