To clients:
Your appointment is at the time it was scheduled for. It’s pretty easy to get a handle on this, because the person who scheduled it told you when it was. Double points if you requested a particular time and got it. If you show up fifteen minute late, you will get a forty-five minute massage and be charged for the full hour. You are paying for my time, idiot, and my time is valuable. Also, If I have another client after you, who in all likelihood show up on time for his appointment, and I am not going to keep him waiting in the lobby while I give you a full-hour massage. His time is valuable, too. If you want a full hour massage, show up on time, dammit.
If you can’t make your appointment, please call and cancel. By standing me up, you are costing me money. See, I reserved that hour for you, which means that it wasn’t available for me to schedule another client who wanted a massage at that time. If you don’t show up, that’s an hour that I could have spent working on another client, and getting paid for it, but didn’t because I was waiting for your ass to get here. Is it really that hard to, oh, I don’t know, pick up the phone and dial our number and let me know you can’t make it? You managed to pick up the phone to make the appointment in the first place, so obviously you know how to use one.
OK, you got here, and filled out the intake form. Good. OK, come on into the room. You can hang your clothes here on this hook. This one. The one I’m hanging my fingers on to make sure you see it. Please hang your clothes on this hook. Do not put them on the little four-legged stool. I use that to sit on when I work on the neck when you are in a face-up position. The thirty seconds or so that it takes for me to move your clothes to the hook is thirty seconds off your massage. And you can put your jewelry, cell phone, watch, etc in the little box on the corner shelf. Please put your stuff in there, and not on my little four-legged stool. The time I spend moving your assorted valuables into the little box also comes out of your massage. So does the time I have to spend actually removing your jewelry for placement in the aforementioned box. And lie face down under the sheet. Under the sheet means the sheet is on top of you. When I come back into the room, I don’t want to knock on the door, hear you say, “I’m ready” and find you sitting on the table, or standing next to it, in your Fruit-of-the-Looms (or less- as the Lord made you is considered proper attire for getting a massage). And, dammit, I sure the hell don’t want to come in and find your bare-naked buttocks looking back at me. Remember, the time I spend outside the door waiting for you to get under the sheet comes out of your massage.
To my coworkers-
Be on time for your appointments. Scurrying in the door when your client has been waiting for you for ten minutes, then asking him to wait while you prepare your room is very much not professional. It doesn’t just make you look bad, it makes the whole business look bad. When you are late, more often than not, the client will not simply decide to book with a different therapist, they will decide that our little studio is not a professional outfit and go elsewhere for their bodywork. Which ultimately costs all of us money.
Poaching clients is not cool. Poaching clients is doubly not cool if you have an actual appointment scheduled and your own client is sitting in the lobby waiting for you while you work on a client who was originally booked with another therapist. I’m surprised that the owner hasn’t booted you and rented your room to someone else, you pull this shit so often. Oh, and everyone else here hates you because we’re all getting sick of coming out after prepping our rooms, wondering where our client is, and why your client is sitting in the lobby twenty minutes after his appointment time, then putting two and two together… This is not only unprofessional, it is petty and childish. You have fewer clients booked than the rest of us? Boo-freakin-hoo. Maybe a few people called up wanting to come in at a particular time and you already had that hour booked, didja think about that? There are other clients in the universe. You will get your share of them, so just get the idea that you’re entitled to our share out of your head.
If for some reason (like you’ve decided you don’t want to) you are unable to work on a client, the time to ask another therapist (like me) to take that client is not when the client is at the front counter checking in. And especially don’t do it right there at the front desk where the client can hear you. And especially especially don’t get the client undressed and on the table, then ask me to take her. That’s… just… wrong.
When you book an appointment, make sure you write it in on the correct day and time. I do not want to have to call our other location to see if they can fit in three clients who want to come in together because you wrote their appointment in on the wrong day (and thank Og someone called the person who scheduled herself and her friends because she needed to move the appointment time back a half hour, because you scheduled them at a time that overlapped with another client, or they would have shown up and there would have been nobody available to work on them). When the client calls back to get directions to the other location, absolutely do not chastise her, claiming in a very nasty tone of voice that you confirmed with her that the appointment was on Sunday, not Saturday. You probably cost the business three potential regular clients with just that one conversation.
See, there are eight of us working here. Each one of us, at any given time, is the face or voice of the entire establishment. What you say or do reflects on all of us. So, the two of you need to either go back to massage school and retake the class on business/professional practices, or go back to asking if you want fries with that and leave the profession to those of us who actually give a damn about our clients and coworkers.
That is all.