I ALWAYS go to the same barber and get the same haircut no matter how strongly the mood for change grabs me.

I’m terrified the barber will retire and I often try to guess his age and how much longer he can continue cutting my hair.

The reason is simple: When I sit in the chair, my barber says nothing and gets on with the job.

When the haircut is finished, I gladly pay him and the transaction is over.

I found a good one — a barber who doesn’t want to talk to me about his personal problems and doesn’t want to know about mine. Remarkably, he just wants to cut the hair in silence and get paid for it.

Others aren’t so understanding. And it’s not just barbers.

Taxi drivers. Shoe salespeople. Car washers. Watch fixers.

The service sector is awash with people who take an undue interest in my affairs and who speak with ill-gotten confidence about their own strange lives.

Thirty seconds after getting into the taxi, it begins.

How’s your night?

Good.

Who’s going to win the cricket?

I haven’t been following the cricket. I don’t know much about cricket.

So is New Zealand really better than England? How could that happen?

I don’t know. I don’t know that much about cricket.

So Australia should win, you think?

And, of course, 9/11 was an inside job. The evidence is quite compelling, if you take the time to read it. It’s about the oil.

A friend recently told me about a trip to a nail parlour in which the woman doing the painting retold how she experienced the spirit of her dead relative.

She insisted after the spirit passed through her house a ‘trail of demons’ was left up the street.

Detail was sketchy when she was asked what the demons looked like, but they were definitely blue.

One might venture that if the demons appeared all along the street every Wednesday night and sometimes had red lids, there might be a scientific answer.

I can imagine the nail parlour chat is one of the hardest to escape and avoid, since you can’t just get up and leave with wet, half-finished nails and the person doing the service is sitting opposite and is unlikely to have postgraduate qualifications.

media_camera It’s time for a universal symbol for ‘I don’t want to chat’.

So enough is enough

Don’t get me wrong, sometimes I do enjoy a yarn, especially with Uber drivers who come from all walks of life and can really be just anybody wanting to supplement their income.

I like hearing about how Uber and the taxi industry are at each others’ throats.

But that’s technically business chat, so I guess it’s OK. The likelihood I’m going to connect on an emotional level with a stranger I’m paying to take me home, trim my sides or mix a Boost juice is very slim.

I can’t even remember the last time I met somebody at a party who I really found interesting, let alone a random member of a big city who wouldn’t be here if my credit card wasn’t.

It’s understandable that the customer service handbook probably says you should ask customers about their day and such. Maybe that works with some people. Maybe it puts them at ease.

But it doesn’t work with me and I’d rather nobody asked me about my day because I know they’re not genuinely interested and, even if they were, they would not be able to fix my problems and I don’t care about their supernatural visitations so they should shut up.

So enough is enough.

It’s about time we established a universal symbol for ‘I don’t want to chat’.

If, like me, you’d rather not talk to people in service situations, print and cut out the above symbol and pin it to your clothing to show people it’s not on.

And please, taxi drivers and hairdressers and others, if you see that symbol, please keep your monologue internal.

@MitchellToy