We just spent $700 on eyeglasses (and exams) for the adults at “America’s Best” and I’m still happy, at least for the moment. I’m the super easy consumer who tries to never buy anything but when I do I always expect incompetence and no accountability and as long as you are friendly and smile and express any measure of competence then I figure that we have a contract where I treat you like you know something of what the hell you’re doing as long as you treat me like I’m human. The few times in my life I’ve gone for the “better” whatever (very few, considering I rarely buy anything) I’ve still experienced incompetence and no accountability so I prefer to go the cheaper route. Like with an eye exam. The last time I had an eye exam was six years ago and I went to an honest-to-god eye doctor in an honest-to-god office and I was treated like shit and had a surprise price tag of $250. Before that my last eye exam had been like fifteen years previous and it had been an honest-to-god eye doctor who I ended up wanting to slap.
You see, one day when I was in sixth grade the PTA eye crew showed up and gave us all an eye exam. They gasped when they did me and scolded me, “You’re legally blind,” like I was a bad person. This puzzled me as I wasn’t a bad person (that’s the bane of my life that I get puzzled by people who treat me like hell when I think hey wait I’m not a bad person here) and I also thought I could see, though my eyes had begun hurting and I was starting to experience occasional tunnel vision and my vision would sometimes black out completely and I would walk into people in front of me. Turned out I had an inherited muscular condition with the eyes (no, not lazy eye) and mine was especially severe and quickly began to degenerate. For the next four years I went to the Medical College and other specialists and did all kinds of vision therapy and prisms and glasses and the headaches became so bad I eventually couldn’t read and I lost all depth perception. I for years didn’t look at anything straight on and held my hand up between my two eyes continually as some kind of reflexive attempt at adjustment. Finally a surgeon said, “Nothing is working and her case is such that she will go blind in that eye if she doesn’t have surgery”. So for several months in my junior year of high school I didn’t read at all because by then I was unable to read, and then I had the eye surgery and voila it was the one thing in my life that worked exactly as they said it possibly could if everything went right and when they had me look at the many pictures of the depth perception test bee with its wings I suddenly had perfect depth perception whereas before I had zero. Now, the thing is that previously when I looked at the 3-d of the bee and its wings, I had no idea of course that I had no depth perception as what I could see was simply what I could see. After the surgery, when they presented me with the bee and its wings, I was very nervous about it and scared to do the test because I had the underlying fear that I might show no difference whatsoever, which would somehow prove that it had all been in my mind (despite the lack of depth perception). So it was quite something to me when they said I got a perfect score. Results! And the headaches stopped and I could read again.
The only good thing the eye problem did for me was I hated sports in school and as they were always ball sports I ended up being exempted from all PE for several years because they were ball sports, volleyball and baseball and basketball. With no depth perception well…one can imagine. I was the kid always beaned between the eyes with the ball and no one in their right mind wanted me on their team so it was a relief to everyone that I was sidelined to the bleachers. I still sucked at sports afterwards but had righteous depth perception and won the egg toss at an employee picnic for the office-supply-store-from-hell where I briefly worked when I was about 24.
Anyway, I didn’t bother going for another eye exam until my late 20s and went to a doctor who was recommended to me but whose testing procedures were primitive by comparison to what I’d experienced in my teen years. He wanted an eye history and when I told him mine he scoffed outright and said the surgeon just wanted to make a buck because no one ever went blind from something like that and I’d just needed glasses as a kid. He was pretty rude to me which I always think is odd when you’re paying someone for a service. I didn’t go back to an eye doctor until I was 43 and age had decided 20/15 vision was something I could do without.
So, I get my prescription from the expensive doctor when I was 43 and I went to Pearle for the glasses and I didn’t like much of what they had and the service sucked and the glasses I ended up with always made me crazy. For six years they have made me crazy. My bifocals were OK but I didn’t like the style and they’ve been heavily scratched for a year and two years before that they were closed in a doorway and mutilated so they sit lopsided on my head and the lenses fall out at least once a day. In my sunglasses, everything behind me is reflected and it drives me nuts that I can see everything behind me and they cause me to do things like walk into potholes because I’m so distracted by looking at everything behind me in the corners of my sunglasses. Plus I have very light blue eyes and they make me ultra-sensitive to certain things with light bouncing all around inside them. Because of this I like sunglasses that are pretty dark because sunlight drives my eyes bonkers, it is harsh and blinding (one reason I like cloudy days) and these sunglasses weren’t dark enough and were muddy and reflecting everything behind me even after I tried to have them fixed twice.
Fortunately I didn’t have to use vision correction at the computer until this past year but couldn’t use the bifocals as I had to look at the monitor with my head tilted at an odd angle so I have been for months struggled with using cheap dimestore glasses which sufficed but also drove me nuts because if I’m not sitting at just the precise right distance they are muddy.
We’re getting ready to go on vacation. I was hoping to get eyeglasses before we went on vacation because I knew I needed a new distance prescription in particular. And I wanted too to get out of the dime store glasses because they drive me nuts. So off today we go to America’s Best because Marty had been there twice before and it did just fine by him. “I like America’s Best, they’re just fine,” Marty said. I said, “Sure, why not,” though I wondered how a business can afford a special of 2 for $69 eyeglasses with exam and designer eyeframes without there being some small print that becomes apparent too late for the visually-challenged. But Marty had been there twice.
The consumer a big business can easily take is the one who needs something right that moment
I had been saying for several weeks we needed to get in “now” for an exam and glasses but it didn’t happen and the co-adult in the household kept saying, “We’ll get the glasses in time, don’t worry.” He’s the one who works for money and is respected for skills people want. I’m the one who can make no money after a lifetime of specialization in artistic skills no one wants nor the produce of them. Plus I homeschool the child who would be the circle in the square at regular school, just like his mother was, and who is dyslexic and artistic and I want him to have an education and a chance and to not be boxed in. Anyway, one of the points of homeschooling is it can be bent around other things in life. Making money can’t. So we waited to go until the adults could go on a day when it could be bent around work.
The consumer a big business can easily take is probably one who needs to work and doesn’t have time to argue with you
I opted for the full blown eye test as it had been six years and because I’ve had relatives with glaucoma. This is where an I-Pod comes in handy. Listening to Iggy Pop or Miles Davis would have meant a mostly non-nervous me but I don’t have an I-Pod so I breathed deep and told myself, “Whatever”, and mostly didn’t shake in my boots but still jumped back three feet when they blasted my right eye with the air in the glaucoma test. The second time I was prepared but still jumped back three feet.
So they ran me through the different machines and I did everything they told me to do and I wondered if I was doing OK because they didn’t give me a clue and then they sent me to a waiting room and I waited to see the eye doctor. There were three magazines on a table that were of the sort I wasn’t going to even dignify as reading material. So instead I popped quarters in the Chicklets machine and played with making faces out of Chicklets. And then I made color wheels with them. Then I played at tossing them into a the metal dispenser of the Chicklets machine and was pleased that I did a direct hit with all and none popped back out, but when you’re doing it from a distance of six inches this is nothing to crow about, it’s just what you call trying to pass time and not make a mess while doing it. And I only wanted to appear partially dimwitted to all the twenty-somethings sitting around with their contacts cases on their knees. The partially dimwitted woman making faces with Chicklets and tossing them a full six inches (well, actually it was almost two feet) at a bowl, I’m all right with that assessment. I figure I’ve done my good deed for the day in providing a bit of entertainment perhaps to someone else who appeared to be bored.
Yes, I am indeed an embarrassment, though I attempt to be a wry kind of embarrasssment.
Marty and H.o.p. were ushered back about the time I had started doing the target tossing of Chickets. “You’re all right!” H.o.p. said. Turns out, when mom had gone into the room with the special machines, he had thought they were going to be taking my eyes out of my head to examine them (too many cartoons).
So then the eye doctor saw me. I noticed the pics on display of her dog and looked at them but decided the dog, though cute, didn’t merit my commenting on it. She did a better job I thought than the high-priced eye doctor six years ago (who one week after I visited her sent out a letter that she was quitting practice completely as she needed to do something else with her life). Turns out my prescription hadn’t changed that much at all and she said I had great eye health which was nice to hear, and is the kind of thing you may self-congratulate yourself for when you’re in your twenties but by the time you’re in your forties if you have half a brain you know it’s all a genetic flip of the coin and nothing to self-congratulate yourself on at all. And if there had been bad news I wouldn’t be writing this post because that’s the way I am too.
The co-adult then had his eye appointment and then we were ready to look at the frames.
A man actually stepped out from behind a counter and offered assistance and–gasp–opinions! This pleased me because I am the kind of person who will buy eyeglasses without looking at myself once in a mirror to see what they look like, because I know I won’t have a clue because I’m clueless about glasses and because I think everyone else in the world looks great but I look like my Aunt Thelma and that’s no good. I knew I wanted red glasses because for the past several years I’ve looked at Heaven Davis’ red eyeglasses with a kind of envy. I popped on a pair of red and black eyeglasses and the salesman said they were perfect and so did Marty. When I tried on a pair and Marty said, “OK”, I knew they weren’t the pair to get. So I went with the pairs to which Marty went “Hmm, OK!” and which didn’t look totally lame to me. Though they were all kind of lame to me. I really wanted the kind of eyeglasses you only get on a 60’s retro website. The only time I got excited was over some eyeglasses that had Sylvester the Cat peering back at you from almost cat’s eye rims. “Sylvester!” I said and picked them up and realized they were small, they were too small, looked up at the sign and saw they were for children. Drat. Had they not been for kids, those would have been my selection because I’m a jeans and black henley top and Sylvester the Cat eyeglasses kind of person. A kind of person who sees Jennifer Anniston’s face on a magazine and thinks “No”, and sees pictures of gingerbread and cakes on a magazine and thinks “No” to passing time with that as well, and is relieved to find a Chicklets dispenser which means I can can play making color wheels and clown faces.
So my three pairs (straight vision for computer, bifocal for regular and then straight sunglasses) that were the $49 frames but with special lens coatings on a couple of them were all written up by the really nice guy behind the counter who really seemed to know what he was doing and was much nicer to me than the people at Pearle had ever been.
The co-adult had said America’s Best was good and y’know it had that special and he’d already been buying his glasses from them for years.
The consumer a big business can probably easily take is someone who is with a co-consumer who has had a positive experience and seems to understand better than you that this is how much it was going to cost even though he was touting the special
The man behind the counter said my total alone came to $397. And I even got the cheap cheap frames. But that’s what it came up to.
The consumer a big business can probably easily take is one who figures you’re one of the small cogs in a big business and that it’s the big business who’s taking you and not the nice person behind the counter
By now, after two hours, H.o.p. was getting really antsy. He’d been great but was now saying repeatedly to me, “I’m bored.”
The consumer you can probably easily take is the one with the bored, antsy child
And Marty’s two pairs with special lenses knocked the price up to $700. How exactly this happened I wasn’t sure because I was also tending an increasingly bored H.o.p., but I figured oh well, considering I spent like $250 on just an eye exam 6 years ago I wasn’t going to sweat it. I’m a lousy consumer that way. I think, “Well, that’s what you get for thinking you’re going to be getting something a bit cheaper, but as long as it’s cheaper than what I got six years ago then whatever.”
The consumer the big business can easily take is someone who has had poor experiences elsewhere and is feeling a bit too good about life that day because for the first time in 12 years the govt isn’t completely run by Neocons…maybe by thieves, yes, but not Neocon thieves
And I liked the guy waiting on us. I liked everyone there. I even liked all the customers. No one smelled like a church pew and no one was trying to blind me with their teeth and no one had looked askance at me for my very broad telling of a coyote story to H.o.p., which is what he asked me to tell him to entertain him at one point, and sensing people listening in I’d thought well we ought to do a good job with the story, that a good coyote story is something everyone can occasionally use, and included H.o.p. in the storytelling as well so it became a co-production and left the punch line at the end for him and smiled for him when the punch line was met with an appreciative guffaw from the customer who I’d sensed had been listening in.
I am a very bad consumer. If I get the glasses and put them on and the world looks like hell through them and I can’t see a thing, I’m the bad kind of consumer who will think, “Yeah, well, yet again, that’s the way everything is.” Which is nothing to be proud of. I just figure that it’s all no-accountability mass production and big business idea of fair play and one’s generally stuck with things being the way they are. And I guess that’s part of selecting your battles too. I figure there’s so much else with which we’re struggling that after all the other battles you look at the eyeglasses and say, “What the hell” and sign on the dotted line because it was better than your experience elsewhere.
They say they will put a rush job on the glasses for us and Marty is even less a good consumer than I am because he trusts that and that we’ll have the eyeglasses back in 5 to 7 working days like they said. He believes the glasses will be in our hands next Friday. But then he’s gotten eyeglasses from America’s Best a couple of times before and it’s always been fine for him.
You can do an “I believe in Peter Pan” kind of thing for us if you want and wish upon a star that we will get the eyeglasses in time for our trip and I’ll appreciate it, and if we do then I’ll give you all the credit.
Or you can say, “You should have known better!” I’ll accept that too.
Update: Looking over the bill, which Marty just gave me, and is clearly outlined, I’m satisfied with it all. And like I said I loved the guy who waited on us. He knew his stuff and called no on a couple of frames I was looking at that he said would end up bruising my nose because of the style and bridge width, which I appreciated. And I’m determined to be happy with it no matter what because he was so good.
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