Google Calendar would have saved my hairstylist a lot of grief
February 9th, 2009
Remember a couple of weeks ago when an office building in Yarmouth was totally destroyed by fire? It left a couple dozen business people without a ‘place of business’; my hairstylist Wanda, who works at Top Cuts, was one of them.
Coincidentally, I got my hair trimmed the day before the fire. Talk about cutting it close (pun intended).
The day after the fire, Wanda called me and asked me to tell her the date of my next cut (it was Feb. 6, this past Friday). Her appointment calendar had gone up in smoke along with everything else in the fire, and she (and all the other stylists) had lost all their records.
I solved her problem by telling her about Google Calendar (take a tour). With “gCal”, keeping appointments up-to-date is a snap, and since they’re online (out there ‘on the cloud’, as it were) they’re safe from nuclear attack as well as fire (that was the original idea behind the Internet, you’ll recall).
Google Calendar lets you easily reset appointments without crossing things out or smudging erasures, as with a physical datebook. You can do things a datebook made out of dead trees can’t, like email an appointment confirmation or automatically send a reminder by email or text message the day before.
A Google Calendar for a business like a salon can be kept private, and if there are multiple stylists involved, each can have her own schedule that’s color-coded.
When I got my ears lowered again this Friday I followed up with Wanda (Top Cuts is temporarily sharing space with Studio 88, another Yarmouth salon) and she likes the idea. First thing’s first, though – they need to get a computer and wireless Internet access before they can put Google Calendar to work. Stay tuned…
