Betrayal At The Hand Of Beard Trimmers

Betrayal hurts, especially when it's someone, or something, you thought was on your side.

I had that happen over the weekend, and I'm still reeling.

Let's rewind.

I started growing a beard the second I could because let's face it, I have a really dumb head. It's big and blocky, with a jawline that isn't so much chiseled out of stone as it is made from Play-Doh,

At some point I realized that you could use a beard and the wonders of illusion (h/t Doug Henning) to make people think that you have a regularly shaped human head.

This was not an endeavor I would undertake alone. I had a partner on this journey: a beard trimmer.

For some reason, one of the best ways to make a beard grow is by trimming it. Think about that for a second.  To make something grow you have to cut it. Weird, right? We should have the scientists take a break from trying to cure cancer or keeping the world from melting to figure that out.

My beard trimmer was my pal and helped me get the job done. It was like a bench-press spotter. Except, thankfully, unlike a bench-press spotter, it refrained from dangling its sack in my face.

Over a time I had developed quite the beard. It was no ZZ Top beard, but it did look like I had made a substantial run in the Stanley Cup Playoffs.

This weekend, that all came crashing down.

I was attempting to do some beard trimming to do away with some wayward wisps of hair on my sideburns. I set the attachment — which kind of looks like a train's cow-catcher — to the proper setting: Eleven, whatever that means. The increments are too small to be centimeters, but too big to be millimeters. It's just an arbitrary scale.

The trimmer made contact with my face and a clump of hair fell to the sink below.

That's quite a bit of hair, I naively thought to myself.

I looked at my reflection, only to see a divot in my beard. Stunned I looked to my trusty set of trimmers and inspected at the setting: One.

Somehow, I had bumped the attachment and set it to the shortest setting. This is where I have a beef with misters Phillips and Norelco. Why isn't there some sort of locking mechanism on these attachments? One slight graze, and this thing clicks down several notches, putting me at risk for an uneven cut.

I was forced to trim down the entire beard I had crafted over many months. The sad irony is that my trimmer had destroyed the very thing it helped create.

It had gotten greedy; flown to close to the sun.

But instead of its wax wings melting, I wound up with a shitty beard.

R.I.P.