Eye yay yay
I lost my eyeglasses back in July, but since I only use them for night driving I can get by okay without them. And so, in all the flurry and brouhaha around my move, I’d neglected to replace them till now.
I must admit I was also hoping they’d somehow turn up, as lost things often do if you wait long enough. But there’s been no Lassie Come Home for my wandering specs, and it’s time to bite the bullet and fork over the money for new ones.
And yet it turns out that eyeglass prescriptions are a highly regulated area of modern life. They’re almost as dangerous as narcotics, apparently.
It’s not as though I haven’t been to the eye doctor many times in recent years and had a succession of lenses placed in an apparatus in front of my eyes, and then been asked to state which is clearer: this or this, this or this, this or this….? Sometimes it seems to be neither, but one must make a choice, mustn’t one?
So I called the eye doctor yesterday to get a copy of my prescription, which by law must have been issued within the last two years to be valid. And since I last underwent an eye exam just a few months ago, no problem, right?
Wrong. The first roadblock was that the office has become so immense and Byzantine, with so many doctors and so many records, that looking up such an item is no longer a simple matter, even in this age of computers. It takes 24 hours for them to order the records from the vast underground vaults.
But I could wait a day; after all, I’ve waited over a month already. Today I got the callback, and was told that there was Bad News. Although I’d had my eyes examined many times in the last couple of years, I’d never had them examined after requesting a new eyeglass prescription.
Well, that was because—as I told the person on the other end of the phone, a young lady who appears to specialize only in dealing with eyeglass prescription questions for this very office—my eyeglasses had been fine. I hadn’t needed new ones, nor a change of prescription, so why would I have asked? And couldn’t I just use my old prescription?
I could; they would reissue it. But, when checked, this led to another problem: they hadn’t actually issued it in the first place. I’d gotten it from some previous eye doctor, whose office I would now have to call.
Great, except for one thing: I couldn’t remember who that might have been. Dredging up the information necessitated rifling through some rather ancient and dusty cerebral files, plus the use of several mnemonic devices including the yellow pages. But it worked, and I came up with the right name and number.
They even had a record of my prescription. Success was near.
So near, and yet so far. It was no go; it turns out I went there back in the year 2000. That’s way too far in the distant past to remain valid, even though my eyeglasses were working just fine, thank you very much, and if I’d never lost them I could have used them for however long we both had lived. I know there’s no need for a change of prescription—but then, who am I, the patient, to judge? The bureaucracy knows best.
And so I will make an appointment at some place like Lenscrafters or Walmart or BJ’s with someone who will obligingly examine my eyes (again) for a fee (again) and tell me what my prescription is (again) rather than use my perfectly good old tried-and-true prescription. At least I’ll get to choose some new frames.
I know that in the vast scheme of things this is really not a big deal. But it’s one of those minor frustrations of modern life, such as businesses who answer their phones with voicemail chains so convoluted and impossible to penetrate that the experience begins to resemble a Borgesian labyrinth.
Good that the weekend’s coming.
This is why I stick to small operations for my eye exams. It’s just ridiculous that they examined your eyes yet they aren’t willing to give you a prescription! The fact that you already have glasses should most certainly have been a clue that they needed to at least have a record just for such an issue as having to replace lost glasses.
For that matter I got a new pair of glasses about a week ago. When I travel I’m getting tired of trying to find small enough vials of eye solution that I can carry on with me. So, when traveling – contacts are out – glasses are in. I go to a small office, so I just call them and they have my records up before I can ask if I need to repeat my name. *grin*
Good luck with the new glasses – to me it’s always a scary proposition because I’m always afraid I won’t be able to see out of them when I get them. LOL.
Apparently in Georgia, the optometrists have been cozy with the state legislature, so no matter how much you are convinced that you don’t need a new exam, and just want to replace an existing pair of glasses, you can’t. It didn’t use to be this way, but if your haven’t had an exam in the last two years, you have to get one in order to get a new pair of glasses. Just protecting us I suppose. Yeah, right.
There are so many things we take for granted, sometimes there‘s little choice.
One hopes for the professionalism of the optometrist. I’ve noticed some rather ambiguous writing on some of my eyeglass prescriptions in recent years. I noticed because I got in the habit of keeping an optical prescription in my wallet to obtain free glasses at work.
Recently I received the wrong drug at a pharmacy. It was hard to figure out who to contact. I started out with the County, then the Federal govt, finally I located something at the state government website.
Some weeks later I had a chat with the investigator. He even came to my home. He was an ex police officer. His theory was that the drugs were next to each other on the shelf and they looked the same except the marking. They are supposed to check the marking, but nobody’s perfect.
He did imply that complaining to my doctor would be the sensible route (the state website didn‘t have a specific place to go for this problem). It turns out the two drugs were very similar in what they do, so this incident doesn’t appear to be such a big deal. The investigator told me not to expect to hear much more about this and that they are discouraged from revealing a whole lot.
I asked him if he had access to know any prescriptions I might have. He said yes. It makes sense. I surmise they need to know if maybe I could have gotten that drug somewhere else and got mixed up.
Sounds like it’d be easier (and cheaper) just not to drive at night!
I feel for you, Neo, and am delighted you’ve found one issue that cannot easily be blamed on the Democrats. Keep it up!
But wait ’til you see what happens if we get socialized medicine…
See, Jim, it can always be blamed on the Democrats!
How to deal with the endless chain of choices phone menus? Do not respond, either by clicking on a menu choice or speaking, in the case of voice activated systems. Be silent, inert, even. Eventually, a real human will speak to you. When that happens, immediately bitch about the labyrinth you’ve been through.
neo, I’ve had the same experience when my 2+ yr. old lenses went kaput due to scratches – the garden variety, non-glass lenses seem to wear out, conveniently, just after the refraction Rx becomes invalid.
Luckily, I found some 15 yr. old glass lenses among my possessions – the frames had merely expired, with the lenses showing only a few speck-like scratches. I’ve worn them for 2+ more years now, the lenses are fine, and I have not died from undiagnosed hypertension or diabetes, which the optomotrists generously admit they should be sued for if they refill perfectly good refraction Rx’s without doing another full exam = collecting some more money.
I can’t wait until we’ll need a full podiatric exam just to get new shoes. If you don’t get this exam, diabetes or any cause of peripheral vascular disease might be negligently “missed”. So you might have a stroke, or a heart attack, lose a foot, etc., causing the Podiatrist to be successfully sued.
The Podiatrists need to wise up.
I just received a new pair of glasses in the mail ;progressive bi-focal lenses, tinted, etc etc for just over $50 . The prescription is spot-on perfect.
Zenni Optical
http://zennioptical.com/cart/home.php
They also sell prescription sun-glasses very inexpensive.
Disposable eyewear at these prices.
Might be worth getting a new script after 2 years though.
There may soon be the higher priced lie detector exams to go with that eye exam. That way the eyeglass profession is protected from insurgent patients who purposely choose to subvert the eyeglass industry by falsifying answers to the “This….Or this” questions.
I’m absolutely certain, based on intuition not actual knowledge, that you can blame the lawyers for this one. You just know that someone sued an optician for failing to advise him that, after the passage of some specific period of time (two years, apparently), he shouldn’t have been driving while wearing his old glasses.
The other thing is that, while you can typically get dental coverage at your place of work, they seldom seem to give you vision coverage. Now, I will grant you that it is nice to be able to eat and get your teeth cleaned for free. But if I don’t have glasses, I can’t even drive to work.