A Maltese man has had a panic attack after running out of small talk while getting his hair cut at a barbershop.
Dylan Micallef, 30, from Naxxar, was midway through getting his monthly haircut and shave at The Groomed Gent barbershop in Birkirkara when the conversation between him and his barber, Kevin Grech, suddenly ran dry.
“I realised something was wrong when we were going through the usual reliable trifecta of topics – football, weather and politics – more quickly than usual. We ended up finishing ‘Manchester United are shit’, ‘the climate is screwed’, and ‘Labour and PN are as bad as each other’ before he even touched my hair with his scissors,” Micallef said.
He added that the situation was made worse by the fact that he and the barber were the only people in the shop at the time.
“Usually there are a few ‘bros’ and ‘bellos’ waiting, and if there’s ever a lull in my conversation with Kevin, they fill the silence with their tales of women they fucked after a party at Gianpula or whatever, and I just smile awkwardly.
“But today there were no bellos, and once we ran out of things to say, the only other thing left to do was to stare at myself in the mirror and contemplate my own existence, which I never like to do before dinnertime,” Micallef said.
“It felt like the haircut was going to last forever, and eventually I couldn’t take it anymore and ran out of the shop with only half my beard trimmed. On that note, could you recommend a barber?”
Contacted for his reaction to the incident, the barber said:
“If only he’d mentioned his existential crisis to me, I could’ve offered him a whisky and discussed what it means to be human, before showing him my tattoo of Aristotle that reminds me how we define our essence through our actions and choices. It’s not my fault he’s intellectually and emotionally stunted.”
