During a recent trip to Big League Cuts for my every-six-weeks haircut, a chatterbox of a man was getting his wig busted (an awesome phrase meaning ‘haircut’ that I picked up somewhere) across the aisle from me.

As is usual, there’s always some chucklehead in the chair who saves everything he has to say about everything for the 20 minutes he’s getting his hair cut – and this guy was ours. He covered a myriad of topics for 10 minutes straight without taking a breather and then stopped the show with, “So, is everyone getting sick yet?”

It was so out-of-the-blue and said with a hint of diabolical undertone which made his barber, my barber and me all cock our heads in inquisitive and suspicious unison. Was he checking to see if the virus he unleashed after entering the building had taken root or was he really that much of an awkward conversationalist? He picked up on our misinterpretation of his question fairly quickly and clarified that he was talking about the head cold that was going around.

The brief thought of biological terrorism visiting a small barbershop in Kentucky was a sobering one. This experience also reminded me that you need to be pretty careful about what you say and how you say it; otherwise, you’re going to have a relatively large man (me) leap out of his barber chair so fast you can’t react and place you in a tight sleeper hold until you spill the beans about the extent of your plot and who else might be involved.

I hate the fact that we have arrived at this point.