M’sian nail salon owner demands apology from client who said being a manicurist is a ‘lowly’ job

KUALA LUMPUR: After a client was rude to one of the nail technicians at her salon, the owner confronted the rude client but was met with only excuses for her poor behaviour.

Explaining that she wanted to apologise “not to the customer, but to one of my own.”

Sereen Eng, who owns POSH Nail Spa in Petaling Jaya, wrote in an Oct 22 Facebook post that a client had told one of the staff that say that being a manicurist is a “lowly job.” She also said that the nail technician’s husband and children would be ashamed of her, “and even went so far as to say she must have had a ‘bad past life’ to end up doing this work.”

“Let me be clear: NO ONE deserves to be spoken to like that!” Ms Eng wrote, adding, “Not someone who shows up every day with steady hands and a kind heart. Not someone who serves with patience, pride, and skill.

Not someone who makes others feel beautiful and confident, often while quietly fighting their own battles.”

Ms Eng went on to say that when she spoke to the client, the woman showed no remorse but only gave “excuses wrapped in self-justification.”

She pointed out that challenges and sicknesses do not give people the right to humiliate anyone else, adding that since the client claimed to be a cancer survivor who had once trained teachers, the woman’s rudeness was “even more disappointing.”

“If you have been given a second chance at life, it is not to spread bitterness but to share kindness,” she wrote, addressing the client only as “Mdm Tan,” but underlining that as someone who has known suffering, she, “of all people, should understand the power of compassion.”

“To survive is a gift. To use that second chance to tear others down is to waste the very grace that saved you,” Mdm Eng wrote, adding that in her work with the cancer survivor support group Pink Unity, she has met many women who embody kindness and grace.

The salon owner also addressed the nail technician who had been belittled, as well as every other worker who had been treated in a similar fashion, telling them their work is meaningful and worthy, and that they “carry dignity in (their) hands every single day.”

“I built POSH 15 years ago on the belief that beauty is not about status, it’s about service,” Ms Eng continued, writing that there are no lowly jobs when they are carried out with integrity and pride.

Instead, “what’s truly low is looking down on another human being and calling it righteousness,” she wrote. /TISG

Read also: US singer Madison Beer pays S$3K+ for Aljunied nail salon’s rental cost to help 21yo owner, who was about “to give up on everything”