Timing is everything. Mine, usually, is not so good.

And for that matter, most barbers and dentists don’t have very good timing either.

Every barber you meet is usually a fun, funny person. They have to be. (Would you let a sociopath take a straight razor to your neck?) I had one barber in Denver who was funnier than Rodney Dangerfield. He was also a bookie and could simultaneously shoulder a corded phone to his ear, cut my hair with sharp scissors, and say cryptic things into the receiver like: “Yeah, yeah, Broncos by 7. Two Grand. Gottit.” And then put the phone and scissors down and write in code inside a black book he kept next to the combs soaking in a glass container of blue Barbicide. Two of my friends in Denver, Pete and Todd, inveterate gamblers, recommended that particular barber. They must have gone more than I, because they were always perfectly coiffed.

Me, I prefer to cut my own hair with clippers in my woodshop, where I built a rack of mirrors. It’s a bit awkward, but it works. My kids say it’s because I’m cheap. The real reason is that I’m deaf (probably from too much time in the woodshop without hearing protection). The last time I was in the barber’s chair, the music was blaring reggaeton and the clippers were buzzing, and the barber, a cool guy, started talking to me. Only I couldn’t make out a word of what he was saying over the music and the buzz. I started nodding and saying, “Yeah,” not sure exactly what I was agreeing to. But I soon saw that I was agreeing to a Mohawk haircut. I’m not exactly sure how the conversation diverted from the reggaeton artist Daddy Yankee to me getting a Mohawk haircut.

My experiences in the dentist office are really not that different. My dental hygienist is really a wonderful lady whom I’ve gotten to know over the years. But often it’s hard to hear over the suction tube. Or else we’ll have a conversation just as the sharp picks and jagged plaque scrapers are millimeters away from my delicate mucous membranes. Luckily, she knows her business and so far has saved me from talking myself into a bleeding diathesis.

Of course, I’m not much better with my own patients. The stethoscope amplifies the deep mysterious “lub-dup” of the heart, the windy sounds of clear lungs (or the crackles of lungs bogged with heart failure), and the whooshing “bruit” in the carotids caused by a narrowed artery. Almost every time I put my stethoscope to a patient’s neck to listen to the carotid, my patient decides to say something. Now, a carotid bruit is not audible unless amplified with a stethoscope. The human voice, on the other hand, phonates a loud sound as air vibrates through the vocal cords in the neck right near the carotids. Voice does not need a stethoscope to be heard, so if I’m listening to your carotids at the same time you decide to speak, WOW, it’s a deafening explosion of sound in the earpiece of my stethoscope. Most of the time it’s not even my patient’s fault, because I find myself asking them a question or making a joke right before I listen to their neck, proving once again that my timing is way, way off.