I got in the car last night to go home and the sun was shining brightly. I noticed my glasses were pretty dirty and reflecting all the goop on them so I took them off to clean them. Untucked the front of my t-shirt, started wiping the left lens, and promptly broke the frames in half.

Fucking typical.

I called Jenn at home, who pointed out that in the interim I could wear my prescription sunglasses for the trip home, and had her call around to the Binyon’s and Lenscrafters franchises in the local mall and find out who would take our insurance and who would do an eye test on short notice (my prescription was old and my right eye needed some serious updating).

She called back and got me an appointment at the Binyon’s - they said they’d take the insurance (Lenscrafters said they would bill me and I’d have to bill insurance; thanks, but what a pain) and they had a doctor on staff to do the eye test.

I raced home, picked up Jenn, and barely made it to the appointment.

The eye doctor experience was different than I remember it being a few years ago when I last did it. Then again, I went to a different doctor then, so maybe it’s still the same there. Now they have this digital imaging technique where they take a digital picture of the inside of your eye rather than dilate your eyes and look in there that way. It’s $20 extra, but I wanted to try it for novelty’s sake, so I paid. Pretty cool. The only down side is the flash - it goes off, literally, right in front of your eye so you see spots for the next 15 minutes or so. They also had this machine that you look into and it auto-focuses on your eye and prints out a baseline prescription. Very cool, particularly from a techno-geek standpoint. I dug it, and had I been given the opportunity, I’d have played around with it for a while to see how it worked.

Anyway, I got my prescription, and it’s slightly stronger than my old one but things are much clearer. I gave it to the salesperson/technician and picked out some new frames.

We started doing paperwork and it turned out they were having a buy one get one free sale on lenses, so I handed over my sunglasses to get updated lenses in those, too. The salesperson started running the numbers and all that, then said, “Okay, cool. We’ll have these for you tomorrow.”

Tomorrow?!?!

The guy on the phone said an hour. When we got to the store, he said an hour. All the way through the process, the phrase “one hour” was key. Tomorrow?

Apparently, because it was after 5:00p and the insurance company was closed or something, they couldn’t verify coverage, so I was fucked.

Awesome.

So today I’ve got no glasses. I’m not totally blind or anything, but don’t give me directions by street names because I can’t read the signs. Thank goodness my job is sitting in front of a monitor; I’m near-sighted, so I’ve got no problems there. I do feel a little naked, though. Hopefully I’ll hear from them today and pick up my new glasses tonight. (I do have a spare pair… but I packed them and I don’t remember which box they’re in. So I have to wait. Fucking typical.)