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2004-02-12 - 7:56 p.m. Never seen anybody quite like me No, I'm not suddenly misquoting Kid Rock. I wish I had a dollar for every time someone has said to me, "Wow, I've never seen anything like this," related to something that was wrong with either me personally, or with something that was going to cost me money to fix. Or both at once, sometimes. The latest is my glasses. I got a new prescription a couple of weeks ago, and the new lenses finally came in this week. Last night I went to get them. When I put them on, there was this huge fish-eye lens effect, and if you've ever worn glasses and changed from one prescription to another, you know that's not too uncommon, and it wears off. I mentioned it to the optometrist, and she confirmed yeah that happens, bla bla. So I came home and proceeded to, you know, use my eyes. Soon the general spatial disorientation did wear off, and that's when I noticed the real problem. The new right lens has flaws in it that make it impossible to see clearly if I'm looking any other direction other than right straight ahead. Off to the side in any direction, left, right, up or down, and no good. It's like there's a bend in the lens; like I'm looking through a glass of water, or like there's a smudge that won't clean off. So I went back out there today, just thrilled to lose even more time from work over these glasses. Practiced my phrasing to make it clear that the glasses had a problem, NOT me. The first thing she wanted to do was check my prescription and see how much it had changed, to see if it was likely that the problem was my eyes having to do a lot of adjusting. I wanted to say, look, chick, I've been wearing glasses for longer than you have been walking the earth, and the prescription has changed more often than Madonna's hairstyle. This is not an adjustment issue. But I indulged her as she looked at the chart. "He did have to bump your prescription up quite a bit," she said. "Hmm," says I, "I seem to remember him saying he brought it down." She looked back. My goodness, she was looking at them in reverse order - I was right. Just a sidebar - I was complaining about the glasses to my husband last night, and he asked me what my prescription was. He expected me to actually know the number. Is he nuts? Do people really memorize that stuff? I don't even know my cholesterol number, leave me alone. But back to the present. Finally convinced that there is a possibility I might know what I'm talking about in terms of my own vision, she took the glasses back to the lab. After a few minutes, she came back out, and said, "Wow, we've never seen anything like this before." The lens is defective - imagine that. She said, "It's weird, you look at a straight line through them, and the line goes all crooked." Yep, exactly. So I was relieved to know they found the same problem I did, and she apologized (good move) and said they'd redo the left lens. Um - it's the right one. "Are you sure?" Positive. "Here, put them back on for a minute and look around." Sigh. Yes. Right lens. Quite definitely. "Well, we'll redo them both." So I just hope they won't screw up the left one while fixing the right. In another couple of weeks I'll let you know. Meanwhile, back to the old lenses. It never occurred to me to wonder before, but suddenly I wonder - what makes it take so long? She said it would be that long because I have "a difficult prescription." Well it would be a shock if I didn't. But why does that make it take longer? Do they try, and get it wrong a bunch of times before they get it right, because it's so difficult? Or is it so difficult that there are only three people in the world who can do it, and they're incredibly busy? I need to do some research on that.
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