Month: June 2018

YouTube is saving me SERIOUS money each year in salon visits

I routinely get my hair colored various shades of fabulous throughout the year.  This has been going on since I was a child when my sister experimented on my long locks in the kitchen.  This was during her very successful cosmetological phase where she contributed to the overall well-being of thousands of members of our little community in Ohio by doling out sweet styles and colors.  I’m pretty sure our town looked like the Hollywood of the Midwest during this creative time.

Up until last year I never had a problem with hair color at a salon.  I went in for a routine color:  highlights and lowlights at a salon I had been to many times before.  I left the salon happy as can be but several days later my hair turned orange.  Not just any shade of orange, it turned clown orange.  The salon had a policy of accommodating any issues so I wasn’t concerned, that is of course until I called the salon and realized they were closed on Sunday and did not have a voice mail box to leave a message and worse yet they had no one on call.  Seriously? No emergency contact?  I work in IT, I’ve been on call 24/7 for the last 15 years.  I consider hair coloring and hair styles to be AS important if not more important than some of the IT emergencies I have addressed after hours.

Panic had not yet set in, even though the Monday workday was looming on the horizon with every non-tick of my digital clock.  I called a few other salons in the area.  Then a few more salons on outlying areas.  Then a few more within a few hours drive of the house.  Then I just started driving, hoping a “walk-in” would be most effective to truly get across the urgency of the situation. Once they got my bright orange head in their sights they would surely switch into emergency room mode where only the most critical are seen first.  Nope.  Every salon, in town and outside of town, was either closed or booked for the day.

For a brief moment I considered stopping by the drugstore and picking up a box of color to fix the issue myself but then I remembered I am a computer programmer and I had in no way ever paid attention to what anyone was doing to my hair in all the years of colors and cuts.  It all seemed pretty magical to me and I had no faith that I could actual do something like this on my own.

Disgusted, I went home and did what any normal person does when they are disgusted, I went to http://www.youtube.com to watch videos of baby bunnies and kittens to cheer myself up:)  While I was there, on a long-shot, I did a search on do-it-yourself hair color videos.  Holy Schnikes! It was a mammoth library of the secrets of the hair color universe revealed to me in 3-minute clips of how-to glory.  The videos were so detailed, right down to what type of box to buy at the drugstore.  By the time I watched a few of the videos I had convinced myself I could color my own hair.  I raced down to the drugstore, bought the recommended color and brand for $8.00.  Yes.  Really.  $8.00.  I successfully colored my own hair with about 13 hours to spare before the Monday morning workday would begin.  I was so happy with the results that I have not been able to justify what I was paying in the salon and I continue to color my own hair thanks to the fantastic tutorials on YouTube.  If you have ever considered coloring your own hair and do not know where to start, visit YouTube first, it is filled with useful information on the subject of hair color.  Here are a few videos I found most helpful when doing my own research:

Think of all the things you can buy with the money you will save! If you need help, here is a list of what is out there in internet land just waiting for you and your cash:

Good luck gorgeous!

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Being internet stupid must stop, how can people believe this junk?

Holy schnikes.  I ran into another case of a person being duped by misinformation on Facebook this weekend.  I’ve lost my patience with the spread of misinformation and from now on the nicest thing I can call it is being internet stupid.

This is the conversation I had that brought this issue to light for the 8 billionth time:

An educated adult who has been in the workforce for many years was telling me about the Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood show and various facts about Mr. Rogers himself.  Facts about Mr. Rogers are well known and are easy to verify so I was really surprised that this person was so drastically misinformed about Mr. Rogers.  When I inquired as to where they had uncovered such nonsense, the reply was something I had already suspected:  Facebook.  The person was stunned that what they had read about Mr. Rogers on a Facebook post was so far from the truth.  The person kept repeating things like “the post seemed so believable”, “I can’t believe I was fooled”, blah blah blah blah.  I will not link to the actual Facebook post here because I do not want to contribute to the spread of misinformation but the post went into detail about a military career that is purely fiction.

I avoided launching into a tirade about misinformation because we all must deal with it so I kept it light and just reminded the person that a social network is just a social network, expect no more than what you would obtain from conversations in a public place with strangers and if you are going to pass along information you have learned from these encounters then you need to fact check first.

Everyone complains about our news organizations (ABC, NBC, FOX, CNN, newspapers, etc) but these news organizations have shown for many, many, many, many years an attempt to deliver news to us with an attempt to fact check and they are held accountable for their mistakes – not always immediately – but they are in many cases.  Random morons floating around Facebook (and other areas of the Internet) that are posting information that has in no way been checked for accuracy are rarely held accountable for the misinformation they spread.  If their account is blocked, they just open another one.  It is up to you to do proper research before spreading information to the entire world with one click of a button.

Good luck.

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