Gen Z in the salon waiting room

 

the image google returns when you search for
"sofa in a small salon waiting room"

I go to the salon on 20th Street the other day. I sit myself in a chair in the waiting area nook. The only other seating is a small sofa. I say this to highlight there is room for three, max. (This might make your brain quake as much as mine because the photo above is of two sofas. This photo is therefore not representative of the actual situation. But I'm way too lazy to find a more accurate representation. So. Yeah. Here we are.)

Right after I sit down, a young woman plops herself into the sofa across from me and casually tosses a large metallic silver weekend bag on the other end of said sofa. Hopefully no one else needs to sit down because the angle of the toss effectively takes up the entire other end of the sofa. Intentional? Not intentional? We shall never know.

One of the salon assistants comes over and places a cup of hot tea on a saucer in front of the woman. He says, "here's your tea!" I'm like, wait? you can get tea in this place? 

I need to level up my life skills.

The woman sips her tea.

I sneeze. Allergies and all that. I do the thing where you twist your torso to the back and then sneeze into the crook of your elbow out of respect for fellow nearby humans. 

I turn back in my seat.

The woman is staring at me, her eyes boring twin holes in my brain. I say, "Oh excuse me!"

The woman continues to stare at me. She says nothing in reply. 

I stare back because I'm a Gen Xer who didn't come of age in the middle of a pandemic.

The salon assistant returns and tells the woman her stylist is ready for her now. He gathers up the tea cup on the saucer and the teabag paper discarded on the waiting room table to carry it for her. She stands and is about to follow him, when he says, "is that your bag?"

She says, "yes, but we can just leave it there" .... you know, taking up half the sofa in a small waiting area where other people might need to, you know, sit. Also in clear view through the window of a busy street in the middle of New York City where, everyone knows,  you can just leave designer metallic weekend bags here or there unattended and it's totally not a dumbass thing to do.

The salon assistant is a lovely guy. He says, "Oh, we should bring it back with us!"

The woman nods and walks off. The assistant, holding her tea, is now trying to pick up the shiny weekend bag and not spill tea all over the place.

I don't know what happened next. I had my appointment and I didn't see her again.