I went into the salon and asked for help cleaning up the shape of my hair. I specifically asked that they ONLY shape up my hair and avoid cutting too much off.
I think I'm a decent communicator, and I spoke clearly with the stylist, but I don't know what happened. I came in with a shoulder-length, outgrown bob, and left with a short, SHORT pixey hair cut. I was basically given the same haircut that the stylist herself had. It fit her personality/face shape but was wrong for me. And no, it was NOT a pleasant surprisel.
I find that one of the telltale signs of a bad hair dresser is trash talking. There was plenty of that here, the hairdresser didn't spare any of my feelings to tell me how my last cut was awful. She then went onto telling me stories of how she "fixes" other people's hair mistakes in a condescending tone.
Besides the trash talking, the hairdresser (female, short red hair) was pretty nice. I'm mostly ticked off by the fact that she totally ignored my request and cut off more than 40% of my hair length. Normally I'm not that uptight about hair, but it took me about 3 months to grow it back to the previous length... Baaaad!