Dearest Simran:
Since you are in violation of James’ pet peeve, no location filled out in your profile, I don’t know if I am typing this note to you from down the street from you as I speak. Please go to your profile, now that you have found that we did not sell your email address to Vector/Global or anyone else for that matter, and flesh it out some. At a minimum all profiles should have a location filled in that gives city, state and country where needed. (Arrogant Americans assume that everyone knows that Albuquerque New Mexico is in the USA)
In return for this courtesy, I will promise to let you know if and when I am in fact near enough to you to do lunch. Deal? <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/wink.gif" alt="" /> After all, I am traveling all the time, and there are many associations, and clients who talk to me about visiting their far off locations. Anything is possible. I will be returning to Hawaii this December for an extended stay and if you were in the part of Hawaii I will be in, we could visit with each other for many hours during that time. So that is all I am going to say. People, please put locations in your profiles. You don’t know the level of help you may be missing out on, if you don’t.
Now on the other issue. I don’t know your electrologist, and I don’t know why she is doing what she is doing. I can’t even say that what she is doing is wrong, as I know nothing about what treating you is like, or what equipment she is using and so on. I can tell you, however that I have seen, and heard some things that I did find disturbing in my profession.
There is the story of the practitioners who learned that using larger sized probes lead to faster completion times, and therefore only use smaller sizes. The ones who learned that once you get to first clearance it is all down hill from there, because there is less hair in the first place, and all of it is in growth phase, so they don’t pursue high level first clearances, and then there was a moment that made everyone in the room blush for the profession at a trade seminar.
I was part of a seminar with electrologists from around the world as the features and benefits of a new machine was being demonstrated, and enumerated. It was explained that the machine would track and save treatment settings and areas worked on, download this information to your computer, and generate billing for the appointments.
When it was explained that one could set a hard minimum treatment fee so that treatments under a given time limit would not be billed at less than your minimum rate on the machine, someone raised a hand and asked the question that left the entire room aghast, and the speaker thinking, “Either I don’t understand the question, or surely this is a joke” <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/blush.gif" alt="" />
The speaker was asked if it was possible to set the machine so that it would bill the minimum rate, as if a new appointment was started, every time one changed the setting to a different body part! <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/shocked.gif" alt="" />
Now let me point out, there is a reason electrologists have minimum treatment price points. We only have our time to sell, and unless one has a staff, one spends more than 7 minutes on a 7 minute appointment. Of course, if one has a staff, one has even higher expenses, and so you need to have a minimum treatment price even more than a sole practitioner does. However, what this person was asking was to be able to set the machine so that if one spent 5 minutes on the lip, it would charge the $20 minimum, and then would again charge a $20 minimum when one switched to the breast setting to do the 20 hairs on the nipples, and again charge $20 when we move to the chin, and once again hit the client’s ticket for the $20 minimum for those wild eyebrows.
I have met some greedy people in my life, but it went straight to my top ten, when I heard someone spend 10 to 15 minutes discussing the desire to find a way to make the machine tell a client that $80 was due for what could amount to less than a 20 minute treatment, using the excuse that there were so many different areas involved, and it is not me, it is the machine that does this automatically. The corporate representative finally ended the discussion by saying, “Who would want that? I think you will just have to take the machine’s breakdown of area, hairs removed, and time spent in each area to make your own separate bill, via the computer link.” <img src="/ubbthreads/images/graemlins/mad.gif" alt="" />
Of course, I could just be the fool selling myself short, grossly underbilling my clients.