Don't you just love it.....

...when you "think" you recognize a phone number as being one of your friends and you answer it in an unprofessional way, only to find that it's actually a client?

I need to plug in phone numbers of friends into my contact list on my phone.

It wasn't "too" bad. I answered it with a big "Helllloooooo....how are you?" instead of my normal "Good afternoon..." followed by my business name, followed by my name etc.

It could have been worse. I could have answered with "What the hec was that on your facebook page last night?", or "I don't know about you, but I'm having a crappy day" or just a blunt "What do you want?".

Yeah...it could have been much worse.

Don't you just love it......

....when you're in a cubicle in the bathroom and you make some extraordinary noises and then you come out and find 3 people at the sink and one of them is your next client?

Yep.
Fabulous.

Proof that I am not a morning person

I'd an early start this morning.
I have a little workflow pattern that I go through to set up before work and as part of that I put my lotion bottle in the towel warmer just to warm up the lotion.

Only this morning I was out of sorts.
I put a bottle of water in the towel warmer.
I caught on when I saw my bottle of lotion and checked to see what I'd actually put in the towel warmer.
If things had gone on in this mode, I would have given the first client a bottle of lotion to drink after the massage and I would have been massaging with warm water.

Then again, I supposed it would be OK to massage with water if the client happens to be possessed - holy water in that case.
Possessed clients aren't fun to work on though. I think it's the way their head turns 360 degrees that's just distracting and the fact that you've to use twice as much Oxy Clean on the sheets since they spew so much green pea soup.
They could do with a face toning massage though!

The epitome of professionalism

I'd a long day yesterday, so I came home and flopped in front of the T.V and watched the mind-numbing Housewives of Orange County.
After lowering my I.Q drastically I got up and felt my butt.
Something didn't feel right.
Sure enough, after heading to the bathroom mirror to investigate I found out there was a huge rip in the butt of my jeans.


I'd been wearing these jeans all day at work and I have no idea when the tear happened. It was no small rip but the only good thing was that I was wearing navy underwear (and no, I don't do thongs - I'm actually glad I wear big Bridget Jones's).

Yep, I'm just the height of professionalism!

Blooper #6

The following happened on a looonnnnng day.
It was my first visit to to local Chamber of Commerce and since I was there as a guest I had to get up and speak for about 20 seconds about my business. It was the day before St. Patrick's Day and there were a lot of people dressed in green - some even dressed up as leprechauns. When I got up to speak I think people thought I was putting on my Irish accent and I became incredibly nervous - I started sweating. I could feel the beads of sweat at the back of my neck and on my lip.
After the meeting I'd to go and do a 1.5 hour hot stone massage, which was hot work, then I'd to get some lunch and rush off to a 3 hour chair massage gig in an office.
While in the middle of this session I had a bit of a panic attack. I discovered that my right armpit was stinking.
Well, if there's one thing that doesn't exactly "go together", it's massage therapy and B.O., and of course I had come to the job without any antiperspirant in my bag.
But I put my thinking cap on.
I spray my chair with Lysol every now and then to prevent the spread of any viruses.
So, yep, you guessed it. I Lysol-ed my smelly pit and know what? It worked like a charm!

The lesson learned here is to always carry antiperspirant on chair gigs and to load up on it on days that I know I'll be stressed out!

Blooper #5

Sometimes we get people wanting specific music played during massage, right?

I was pleased to have one of my clients request Pink Floyd since they're one of my favorite bands, so I put on Dark Side of the Moon.
The lesson learned is to NOT play this CD if your client has a habit of falling asleep during the massage. Although it starts of nice and slow, there's one point in the middle of the CD where alarm clocks are played very loudly. The client jumped up, startled, with the daylights scared out of her when the alarm bells woke her up.
It was kind of funny though.....

Blooper #4

This one happened on a chair massage gig and it really isn't that funny, but there's a lesson to be learned.

I was working on someones shoulders during the chair massage when I realized I was rubbing the color off her sweater. Yep, turns out the stuff I was using either to sanitize my hands or clean the face cradle (I think it was the cleaner) was taking the color off her clothes. I'd to give her money to replace the sweater.

Lesson to be learned: check your hands and make sure you've no cleaning materials on them before starting a new client. Also, check the hand sanitizer to make sure it won't remove coloring from clothes.

Blooper #1, #2, #3

OK, so on massageprofessionals.com there's a group where we write about bloopers in massage and I've written 3 on there already. I never wrote about them on here, so I'm re-posting them here so that those that aren't on that group can read about them here. Then I'll add more on here and just put a link to them from their site so that I don't take up that much room on their wall.

Capiche?

It's sad that I've got so many of these stories. I'll start posting the other ones after this....

OK, here are the ones I have posted already:

#1
I'm from Northern Ireland and over there "Erasers" are called "Rubbers". So when changing a client's appointment time in front of her I forgot what country I was in and said I needed to find a rubber before I could change anything. It was a few seconds before I realized what I had just said. I then had to explain (with a very red face) what a rubber was where I come from. She came back anyway!

#2
The following incident happened when I was working out of my home and it's a reminder to always ask the client if they want to use the restroom before leaving them to get ready.

I left the client to get on the table and went to the kitchen to warm up my rice back warmer. My house isn't totally open plan in that you can't see the kitchen if you come out of the room I did massage in, but you can hear what is going on. it took a couple of minutes to warm up the back warmer.
So I'm talking to myself in the kitchen and I come out and the client is standing there wanting to know if she can use my restroom.
The thing is, it's not so much that she caught me talking to myself - it's what I was saying.
I was practicing my Sean Connery impersonation.


#3
OK, here's another one that happened on a home visit. Luckily I'd been working on the couple for years (and still do) but there's a lesson to be learned from this one too.

I was setting up for the massage in one of their bedrooms. I'm sure they wondered when they heard me yelp pretty loudly. The woman comes into the room and finds me standing very awkwardly - I think I look like I was playing twister by myself, but without the actual game. I also had a very red face.
"What's wrong?"
"Um...well...underneath my right foot there is a bug. Could you do me a favor and get me a tissue?"
She gets me the tissue and I very quickly get the bug and squish it (apologies to any Buddhists reading this). Luckily there wasn't too much of a "bug gut" issue on their carpet!

OK, this doesn't sound too bad, right?

The thing is, this was a HUGE freakin' mutant cockroach that had come FLYING off MY sheets when I was shaking them on the the table AND HIT ME ON THE HEAD before landing on the floor.
Thankfully the client didn't get to see the thing. Nor did she ask where the thing had come from.
I used to work in software debugging code. Now when I do an home visit I do a little different type of checking to make sure I don't have to debug in the literal sense - I also make sure I don't ever put my bag in the garage.

"My little Alien friend will be massaging your neck"

Don't you just love it when you're working on someone's back and then suddenly your stomach starts to make these really weird, LOUD noises right next to the client's head? It sounds like there's a dinosaur in your chest or like you're about to do a John Hurt impersonation on the table and have an alien burst out of you.

It might be handy to have a wee alien buddy work on the client's neck though - some of those knots need chewed!

Gaelic lesson #37 "goile", pronounced "gill-ye", meaning "stomach"