Hit my 1,000th haircut at the shop on 5th and Main and I still can't decide if it means anything
I marked my 1,000th cut behind the chair on a Wednesday afternoon, a basic taper on a regular who's been coming in since I started, and my boss said congrats while the older guy next to me shrugged and said numbers don't make you better. I get both sides, one part of me thinks tracking cuts is just a scoreboard that ignores whether the fade was clean, and the other part thinks it proves I showed up and kept going long enough to get good. For the vets in here, do you count your cuts or is that just a new-school thing?
There was a barber on a podcast I listen to who said he stopped counting after 10,000 because the number started messing with his head. He'd have a bad day with three sloppy cuts and still hit his goal, or do the cleanest fade of his life on a slow Tuesday and feel like it didn't count for anything. What stuck with me is he said the number only tells you how long you've been standing there, not how good you got. The guy next to you isn't wrong, but your boss isn't either. Showing up that many times is its own kind of skill, just not the whole picture.