Gimme a head with hair

If I can take a step back from the weighty topics we usually cover here at Save the Empire, there's a completely minor issue that nonetheless has been niggling at me for the better part of a decade. It's a question, really: how much should I tip the person who cuts my hair?

Perhaps some background is in order. Through grade school, middle school, and early high school I wore my hair in the style classically known as "dork short." Being who I am, naturally I had short hair in the one stage of life where you can really get away with long hair. Nonetheless, sophomore year came and for reasons I can't remember, I decided to grow it longer. Even that wasn't especially long, being what most people would probably consider normal, at least until senior year. But oh, senior year I let it get even longer, and then in the summer before college I committed the cardinal sin of continuing to let it grow.

Now, I know some people look good with long hair. Some people look great with long hair. I am not one of those people. My hair is blond and thin, and the back always seems to grow faster than the front so I invariably wind up with a mullet. Which is exactly what I rocked for three of my four years in college: a mini-mullet. It wasn't a full, Billy Ray Cyrus-esque rat tail in all its glory, but still... it didn't look good. I thought it did, of course, because I was in my introspective, soul-searching phase where I was spending entirely too many walks to class mulling over my place in the universe. I think my naive belief was that girls would subconsciously pick up on the tragic, romantic soul hidden behind my deep blue eyes and want to reach out to the long-haired loner they sensed within. And maybe that kind of Twilight crap works for philosophy majors reading poetry in coffee shops all day, but what I idiotically failed to consider was that I was an athlete, and I hung around with my fellow athletes almost exclusively. Now, this was a swim team, not a football team, and these were among the most intelligent, non-meathead athletes you've ever met -- very much not the insensitive jock stereotype -- but they still were about as far removed from the introspective loner mentality as it was possible to be. Who had time to hang out in coffee shops when you had practice in an hour? Despite all that, I kept my hair long until senior year, when I finally shaved my head for a major swim meet. Purely coincidentally, I'm sure, the second half of senior year was also when I started dating my only real college girlfriend and kicked off my longest sustained dating streak (defined for our purposes as not going longer than a month or two without a date/girlfriend) until meeting Ann.

But it was also early senior year when a friend asked me how much I tipped the person who had just cut my hair, and when I answered two dollars, he replied "Ah, you cheaped out." That gave me pause, and in retrospect he was right- I should've given three, since that was a time when cutting my hair still required some effort. But pretty much ever since the end of senior year, I've kept my hair short. Ann prefers it that way and it's easier for me, and I finally made the hockey haircut/you look unappealing connection, so it's just best for everyone. However, it's also led me to give serious thought to the tipping issue again, for the simple reason that my hair is now the easiest thing in the world to cut. They just use the electric clippers, setting "3" on the top and back of my head and "2" on the sides. I don't have them wash my hair, so they just run the clippers over my dome a few times, trim up the sideburns, and that's it. I have literally had haircuts that took less than five minutes, and going much over ten is a rare occurrence. (Except for that one woman who insisted on trimming my eyebrows, but she was weird.) In most ways this is good for everyone: I don't have to waste much time or make idle small talk for very long, and the haircutter certainly doesn't have to work very hard. But I go to the Hair Cuttery, whose price is $13 a cut. That makes it really tempting for me to just fork over $15, say "Keep the change," and go on my merry way. And I guess technically, that is a pretty crappy tip... $2 out of $13 is, I think, less than 15%. But on the other hand, am I really obligated to tip extravagantly on the easiest haircut they've ever given? When I go out to a fancy restaurant, I tip and tip well, but I don't give a little something extra to the guy who hands me my food at Wendy's, y'know?

So that's my situation. Some visits I tip $2, sometimes $3 if I danced the night before and have singles to spare, but I've never really come to a consensus. If anyone wants to weigh in on this admittedly pathetic dilemma, phone lines are open, call now.