Up to You
This one is for my hairstylist Gracie.
Every haircut I've gotten since high school has started with a photo of someone who is not me. Wispy bangs off a girl I'll never meet. A jellyfish cut, two years ago. Bangs and a bob, another time, that made me look like Willy Wonka. I want to be clear that the photos never worked, not once, and that this changed nothing about my behavior. I kept saving them. There's a specific kind of hope involved in handing a stranger a picture of a different woman's head: you aren't really asking for the haircut, you're asking to come out of the chair as someone else, and everyone in the salon knows it, and the ritual continues anyway.
The last time, my stylist barely looked at the photo. She asked me things instead. Did I blow my hair out (no). Did I own a round brush (also no). How long did I actually spend on it in the morning before giving up and clipping it back (lol). And then she didn't offer me options. She told me what she was going to do, what she wasn't, and why the photo I'd saved was never going to appear in my mirror in the morning. It's a routine, watching women be overly optimistic about their routines. She already knew that whatever I said in that chair, once I left I would do nothing, so she cut something that would survive that.
What I felt in that chair, I now realize, was relief, the relief of handing yourself over to someone who obviously knew. I sat in the salon chair thinking, I trust this woman completely, and then, forgive me for being cheesy but this is genuinely what it felt like, a lightbulb moment: this is what the people on my calls are supposed to feel about me. That's the job.
I'm a sales engineer. Customers get on Zoom calls so I can explain our product to them, except, you see, that isn't really the job, because most of the product is already explained, for free, on the internet. The specs are public, half of what I could recite on a call is a search away, and everyone on the call knows it. The one thing that isn't public is pricing. You have to sit through a demo like mine to get a number, so some people are on my calls because they're required to be, and if all I do is walk them through screens they could have found themselves and hand over a quote at the end, then that's all I was to them: the gate they had to pass to see the price. But as soon as a customer asks how they should set something up, or what companies like theirs usually do, they're asking for the thing that was never going to be on the website. They want someone to look at their round-brush situation, their morning routine, and tell them the truth about how they actually run.
At first I wouldn't. Someone would ask which approach made sense for them and I'd say, well, you could do this, or this, it really depends on your needs, it's up to your team. I told myself this was balance. It took time to admit it was cowardice with good posture: if you never say anything, you can never be wrong. I was complicit in giving them the cookie-cutter haircut from the photo. That's what they had asked for!
I don't think it's a coincidence that hedging felt safe, either. Laying out options is a very rewarded way for a woman to be smart. Thorough, accommodating, no opinion taking up space in the room. But my stylist tells paying customers no all day, I won't do that to your hair, and I keep going back to her, because being refused by someone who took the time to see you is better than being obeyed by someone who didn't.
The same sentence lives at home. What do you want for dinner. Oh, up to you, I'm easy. It sounds generous, and it isn't, because the person saying it hasn't given anything up. Suggest the wrong restaurant and watch their face. They've kept the veto and handed over the work: remembering what's in the fridge, what you ate last night, which places are open on a Tuesday, whether anyone has the energy to drive, and then holding the blame alone if the food is bad. People call this the mental load when they write about marriages, and the dinner question is the smallest unit of it, not who cooks but who has to know what dinner should be.
I'd love to say I'm only ever the one getting handed the decision, but up to you is a sentence I know from the inside. It was mine on calls from my first week, and from my side it never felt like handing anyone anything. It just felt easy. But the sentence ends the conversation, and every time I said it there were questions sitting right there that I never asked, what was actually not working for them, what they'd tried already, what they were afraid of getting wrong. My stylist could have said up to you. I was a paying customer holding a photo, she could have just done what I asked and let me live with it, and it would have looked like service. But she didn't, and that is the whole point of this essay.
Her questions were the whole appointment. I used to rush mine. I'd ask the basics, how many vehicles, what are you using now, and then get to the dashboard as fast as I could, because the demo felt like the part where I get to be impressive. Then I'd be three screens in, flipping between features, suddenly unsure what to actually show these people, because I'd skipped the part that would have told me. I was running demos the way I got haircuts, off a picture of some other company. "If you guys happen to need IFTA, there's a feature for that" or "Not sure if this would be applicable for your company but we can automatically track maintenance on your vehicles." These are real sentences I've said that were so close to being useful. They could've easily been tied into the customer's actual operations, their actual pain points, if I had just asked.
And so that's how I realized most of the useful things I've ever said to a customer came out of the first ten minutes. It feels silly saying this out loud, but sales requires empathy. You have to care about the person you're selling to before you can understand them. And when you do, people tell you things. Someone mentions, offhand, that the person who championed the last system quit and nobody has logged into it since, but they had an accident two weeks ago and now insurance is asking questions, and they're trying to figure out how to improve the safety culture among the drivers and get their buy-in for a system that currently feels like Big Brother when really it's about exoneration and having the footage at the right time because nobody has time to be watching them pick their noses anyways, and now I know something no script can figure out, which is where this company is at right now vs where it wants to be (and where it wants to be is where I can help!). My stylist figured out who she was cutting for before she picked up the scissors. That was the part I'd been taking for granted.
So now when someone asks me what they should do, I try to actually say it. A company installs our dash cams and wants everything on from day one, every AI detection for driver behavior and the in-cab alerts too, so the camera goes from watching the drivers to scolding them out loud in the same week. I used to walk them through the settings and let them decide. Now I tell them not to. I've watched fleets do it, and a month later half the footage is the inside of a hoodie somebody draped over the lens, because the drivers never got a chance to get used to being watched before the thing started talking to them, and an obstructed camera detects nothing. Turn on the detections, let it run quiet for a while, add the alerts once your drivers stop resenting it. I can say that because I've sat through enough of these rollouts to know what breaks, what nobody ends up using, what safety managers wander up and admit at the booth I'm manning in a conference exhibition hall, things they would never put in an email. None of it is on the website. It exists because I was there for it.
I kept bracing for someone to push back, to ask who I thought I was. Nobody has. People are relieved. They wanted to be told, the same way I'd spent a decade in salon chairs hoping someone would finally take the photo out of my hands.
I haven't fully become her yet. I still hedge sometimes, usually when I'm tired, and it depends on your needs is still the easiest sentence in the world to say. But when I catch myself reaching for it, I think about sitting in that salon chair with wet hair, wanting her to just take the photo away. She did. I'm trying to learn to do that for other people, on calls and even at dinner. Some days I manage it. Some days I don't, and I can hear it happening, but I'd like to think those moments are few and far between now.