It rained last night. A dreary splattering of wetness that varied little in intensity and continued on into the night. It was as if God had gone retarded and was drooling on the world. Since it rained I could not ride my bike. So I stared out the window and sighed suffering sighs of longing for the bike ride that would not come that night.
I need a new pair of glasses. I normally wear contacts for my day-to-day act of seeing, however when I am lounging around the house, particularly on lazy Sunday mornings, then I like to just toss on a pair of glasses. However, my glasses have been slowly deteriorating. My pair is now dirty, bent, scratched, and is missing one arm. I replaced the missing arm with one from a cheap pair of sunglasses, held together by a twist of wire. They are truly a sorry spectacle of spectacles.
I have needed a new pair for a while now, but two things have held me back form doing so: The cost of glasses, and my hate of optometrist. Money is the obvious problem: glasses are expensive. A decent pair can cost around a hundred dollars, several hundred for fancier versions. Every now and then you will see an ad in the paper advertising one or even two pairs of glasses for under a hundred dollars, sometimes as low as fifty. At that point it seems like a good deal. It's not, because you have to deal with the Optometrist.
I may have ranted about Optometrist before. I do not like them. I have never had a good experience with one. I also find them pretentious. I dislike the fact I have to refer to them as 'doctor'. In my eyes, they are not doctors. Sure, he may check my eyes for glaucoma, but so does my real doctor. Due to modern technology the entire eye exam you have to pay for can be done with a machine. I have no doubt you could replace most of the functions of an Optometrist with a photo-booth like machine. Shove your five-dollar bill in, look through a viewfinder and press YES or NO until it figures out your prescription, which it spits out the side. That way you do not have to put up with the entire office visit, the waiting room with crappy magazines and screaming kids, the unnecessary prodding and violations of personal space, and the fact I have to defer to some pretentious schmuck who demands I call him 'Doctor'. And, finally, the Optometrist will tack on more extra fees then a mechanic at a 18 dollar oil change.
So yesterday I browsed the web a little bit to see if I could find any places online to order a pair of glasses. Naturally the disadvantage would be that I do not get to try before I buy, but the advantage would be not dealing with an Optometrist. Lo and behold I find a website that can send you a pair of prescription glasses for the shocking price of nine dollars.
It seems almost too good to be true. I dug out my old contact prescription and sure enough it had my eyeglasses prescription as well. The only thing I did not have was the PD, the 'pupil distance', which is the length between one pupil to the other. That was no problem; I just measured it myself with a ruler. I went ahead and ordered myself a pair of ugly-ass plastic frame emo-boy glasses. Something I would never wear out of the house, but would be good for when I was at home and working around the house because the wide frames were stronger and could double as safety glasses. The price plus shipping came out to be $15.50. If the glasses actually come through and work OK then I might another pair or two. They also have a wide variety of lens tints to pick from. Maybe I'll get myself some blue tinted aviator frames. And I won't have to deal with an Optometrist.
2026 Update
Dialing the infernal clock to a damp January 2007, when Ed measured his own pupil distance like a man assembling a mail-order bomb.
Ah, 2007: when a man trusted a ruler over a doctor and considered a nine-dollar pair of glasses a clever rebellion instead of a red flag. The world has changed, my rainy little Luddite. Back then, online eyewear was a half-mythical website with a specials page; now you can scan your face with a phone, order four pairs from your sofa, and still somehow end up in an insurance-fighting pit with someone named Tiffany. The photo-booth optometrist Ed dreamed of basically exists, but the optometrist refused to die—he just moved into a telehealth portal and asks you to hold your finger next to your face for a blurry screen test. Also, the five-dollar bill he wanted to feed a machine now feels like a museum artifact. You still cannot escape the 'doctor' honorific; you just get billed for it in subscription increments. And honestly, Ed, glasses being nine dollars was not a triumph of efficiency—it was a dare from the infernal realm, and you took it.
“2007 Ed, after measuring your own pupil distance with a ruler and mailing fifteen dollars to a website that looked like a shrine to broken HTML, did those nine-dollar emo-boy glasses arrive as a miracle or an apology?” — Beelzebubba the Third
2007 Ed: So, Beelzebubba, I’m happy to report the damned things actually showed up. Felt like a tiny miracle, right up until I put them on and the world tilted like I'd had three cheap beers. Turns out my ruler-pupil-distance trick was close, but “close” in eyeglasses is like “close” when jumping a moped over a canal. The left eye was fine, the right one made the floor do this slow wave. Still, they were nine bucks, shipped, and I didn’t have to call anybody “doctor.” I wore them around the house as safety glasses while I sanded the boat, and honestly they kept sawdust out of my eyes just as well as a fifty-dollar pair. Ugly as sin, though. My emo cat looked at me like I was trying to steal his whole identity. I kept them in the toolbox for when I’m hammering or painting. So: miracle, if the miracle is keeping sawdust out of your face for less than the price of a pizza. Take that, fancy eyeglass stores.
