Unhappy-itis

VIEWPOINT

By RALPH HARDIN

Evening Times Editor

While out of town recently, I had some time to kill waiting on a friend to get off of work, so I decided to go get a haircut. Being unfamiliar with the area, I just Googled barber shops near me and picked the closest one.

It was a “regular old barber shop,” in that it wasn’t some kind of fancy salon or hair stylist — it was three guys with their own barber chairs and a wall of chairs on the opposite side. It was no frills and the two men cutting hair (the third chair was unattended but being sat in by an older looking fellow) looked like your typical old-school barbers.

It smelled of hair tonic and the smell of old buildings and was not unlike many of the barber shops I have frequented over the years, right down to the outdated issues of Sports Illustrated and some kind of gun or hunting magazines (way back in the

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day, such a place might have Playboys sitting around but I don’t think that would fly these days… side note: Is Playboy still a thing?

Anyway, even at 50, I’m pretty sure I was the youngest guy in the shop. It was 10:30 a.m. on a weekday, so I guess everyone younger was working. There were about seven men there not counting me and there were at least three different conversations all happening at once.

While they were all about something different, I quickly picked up that the entire room had a case of unhappy-itis.

Everyone there had something they were outraged about it seemed.

“Gas prices are down, I see.”

“That’s just Biden trying to get votes before the election.”

“They got a new store factory opening up over in so-and-so in a couple of months.”

“Bet they don’t pay nothin’.”

“Went and ate at the steakhouse.”

“How was it?”

“Food was OK but we couldn’t get the waitress to even get a refill.”

“Yeah, nobody wants to work anymore.”

No silver linings here. It was just 30 straight minutes of that kind of miserableness. At least my haircut went smoothly. I suppose everyone has something to complain about these days. But just for the record, no one ever “wanted” to work. Weird that some people think otherwise.