So I got new eyes

Bought new glasses. The old ones were junk, as I’ve adequately explained, but my good father had budgeted for new glasses for me via his insurance plan. He informed me that it was only good for glasses purchased in 2007, so I had to step on it if he was going to make a claim.

I decided to return to the same place where the nice lady so kindly fixed my glasses for free last time, as that was a business practice I wanted to reward. I walk in on Monday afternoon and state my desire to make an appointment to have my eyes checked.

“But why? You don’t need an appointment for that.”
“I don’t?”
“Of course not. You can have it done whenever’s good for you. Just let us know.”
“Like right now?”
“Well sure! Just go right on upstairs, someone should be available to see you immediately.”
“How long would the testing take?”
“About five minutes.”

This is where I gave her the eyebrow and lamented the fact that I didn’t know the word for “quack” in German. (Evidently it’s Quacksalber, which of course we have in English, but I happen to like “Wunderdoktor” a whole lot, too.) But I figured what the hell, I have some time on my hands, and if this dude blinds me, it’ll make a great blog post. (He didn’t. My foreshadowing is never so heavy-handed, thank you.)

I ascend the spiral staircase and am indeed helped very quickly. The woman there asks to see my glasses, and bids me sit down in the spiffy spacechair of vision assessment. After some awkward fumbling around, I locate the chair, sit down suavely, and try to figure out what she’s doing with my glasses those 5 long meters distant, lost to me in the fuzzy fog of myopia.

Turns out she was shooting lasers through the lenses or something to evaluate my prescription. She comes up to me, positions the Transformers mask in front of my face, then dials in my prescription. She flips a switch and asks me to read the chart on the wall. I can, at least as well as I could with my glasses. She flips another switch, asks “Better or worse?” then does it again, and I’m happy. Evidently my eyes have hardly changed in two years, which is a great relief, and certainly a welcome change from the times when I would go legally blind while walking to the car after picking up new glasses.

She asks whether I’ve already picked out frames, because she can have the glasses ready in an hour. I tell her I hadn’t, no. So we go down together and she pulls out a few frames she thinks would look good on me.

“Um, do you have anything in black? That would probably be the best.”

She puts the baby blue frames back on the display rack, curiously leaves the neon green ones, and finds some black frames. Well, the fronts of them were black, but the arms were fire engine red.

“No, I’m sorry, we don’t have any without the red arms.”

Sigh. This blows. It’s extra ridiculous because I have to take off my own glasses to try on each pair, then lean in to an inch a half away from the mirror (you think I’m joking?) and pretend that I can see them. I mutter something about how I wish I’d thought to bring my contact lenses, and she says, “Great idea! Would you like some?”

I’m hustled back upstairs, where she invites me to wash my hands while she extracts a disposable pair of lenses for my exact prescription from a huge cabinet. I pop them in, and yep, they’re perfect. Back to glasses selection.

She’s all about the damn green ones. I mean, OK, the fronts were also black, but dude, the arms were neon freaking green. She assured me they look great. “Very European.” Right. That’s the problem, lady.

After some more rummaging around in one of the drawers below the display cases, now that I could see, she has one last suggestion for me. They’re not black, more like gun metal gray or something, but they’re hot. Sold, I take them.

I’m told to come back in an hour. I do, I’m handed the glasses, pay, leave. Actually she let me take out my lenses there, so I could wear the glasses home. And actually she also took a moment to fit the glasses to my head, but really, I was blown away with the speed at which all this happened. I was in that place for about 15 minutes total before being told to come back to pick up the glasses. Freaking amazing.

So how do you like them?