I once worked with a guy who said I drove like his grandma. Here's some background for context. He drove a sports car fairly aggressively, and unsurprisingly to the rest of the crew, totaled it one day. A buddy of his stepped in and loaned him his family's secondary vehicle, and within a week he managed to wreck that, too. Dude wound up having to tool around on his motorcycle in the dead of winter, and, unbelievably, he totaled his bike and put himself in the hospital. By comparison, I probably do drive like his grandma.
Over the time we worked together, we enjoyed smack-talking with each other. Although a decade or so younger than me, he had the annoying habit of calling me "Kid". I responded by calling him "Junior", and that tended to blunt that habit.
Another way I'd get his goat was to purposely stare at his forehead when we talked. I figured out early on that Junior was very self-conscious about his receding hairline. Periodically I'd hear him over the partition separating our workstations when he was on the phone with his doctor trying to renew his prescription for Rogaine.
As we talked about shop operations, I'd casually glance at the top of his head, let my gaze linger for half a second too long, and quickly avert my eyes. In a Pavlovian response, his hand involuntarily brushed his hairline as if to verify it was still there.
The frequency with which I did this in a conversation was directly proportional to how annoying he'd most recently been.
Some guys will go to more extremes when faced with male pattern baldness. At a prior company, my coworker, Mike, and I decided to grab lunch at the diner in the building next door. As we're heading over, he's telling me not to stare at the owner/cook's forehead. My next question was obvious.
"Why not?"
"Man, Wayne, the guy just went through a hair transplant session, and it's...uhhh...not good." Pressed for details, he continued. "You can see these little tufts of hair in perfect rows across his head. It looks like a miniature cornfield."
I laughed, and Mike admonished me again to not stare. He didn't want to piss the guy off and get banned from the closest eatery to our office.
We get in, and I step up to the front register. I'm leaning on the countertop, looking down at a paper menu, and after deciding on a burger instead of a wrap, I looked up. There, a scant 6 inches away was the shiny top of the cook's head. He was leaning on the countertop, also, pencil in hand, ready to write down my order. As my eyes focused in, I saw exactly what Mike was talking about.
Row after symmetric row of tiny hair tufts were visible on his pate. As he moved, they appeared more pronounced and cast tiny dots of shadows on his head because of the harsh overhead light. As my brain was trying to establish pattern recognition, I decided Mike was right. They did, in fact, look like tiny rows of corn. I snorted involuntarily, and he looked up. "Eh? What was that?"
OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. OMG. Don't look, Wayne, don't look.
I cut my eyes back to the menu and coughed to cover my chortle. "A, umm, a cheeseburger and fries, please." I'm trying to drive images of the gloriously bad hair job from my head and my hand goes to my mouth to stifle a laugh. When he turned to cook my food, I got a pop on my shoulder and a reprimand from Mike.
"Wayne, man, be cool!"
We rehashed the scene walking back to our building. "You weren't lying. That was pretty gnarly." We both decided it was a hard "no" on any type of hair transplant if our coiffures began to thin. We absolutely wanted to avoid the "young corn crop" look.
But the genome shuffle doesn't have that in the cards for me since I still manage to sport a full head of hair. Although that hasn't stopped Andrea from offering to shave my head multiple times, just to "see what I look like."
Yeah...I'm good. I'd rather not force it one way or the other. It will be what it will be.
