Buying Eyeglasses

It’s been two and a half years since I bought my first pair of prescription eyeglasses. My experience with the eyeglass shop was frustrating.

I intended to get progressive lenses, so I could wear the glasses all the time and they’d be good for reading and distance vision. (No having to constantly put on and take off anything.) The doc examined my eyes and gave me the prescription. I picked out some nice frames and waited the week for the process of putting the lenses in the frames.

When I went to the store to pick up the glasses, the frustration started. The first thing I noticed with the glasses on was that there was a distortion. Square things, like paper, books, computer screens, (you know, those things I’m looking at for the vast majority of my day), were trapezoidal. The eyeglasses person, (salesman? representative?), said I’d get used to it. But I didn’t. I gave it a week, but the distortion was just too great, too distracting. The square-to-trapezoid shapes were not subtle; it felt like being in some weird, non-Euclidean dimension.

I took the glasses back and told them that I apparently just can’t handle the progressive lenses. I explained how the trapezoidal distortion bothered me too much. So I had them just give me my prescription in a reading lens. I’d just live with having to put them on and take them off as needed. I waited another week for the process.

When I went to the store to pick up the glasses again, and tried them on, I immediately saw the trapezoidal distortion, still. “It’s still got the distortion,” I said. “Are you sure these aren’t still progressive lenses?” I asked.

The salesrep took the glasses back to their room and tested the glasses. He confirmed the lenses were not progressives. They even sent me back with the eye doc again to confirm my prescription needs. During that second exam, I mentioned to the doc that the trapezoidal distortion was a problem. She acknowledged the issue but gave no explanation for it. This seemed to me as confirmation that the distortion was due to the progressive style lenses.

Then I went back out with the glasses salesrep, with my prescription confirmed, and we discussed my issue. I was still unbelieving that the reading glasses didn’t have progressive lenses because of the obvious trapezoidal distortion. Throughout all of these conversations with the salesrep, (2 of them over the visits), and the eye doc, no one directly said what was causing the distortion – the distortion was the only problem I had with the lenses. I assumed it was due to the progressive lenses, but with the salesrep sure these new lenses were not progressives, I was confused.

“So why the distortion?” I asked.

“It’s your prescription,” was the answer.

I couldn’t understand that concept. Why would my prescription, to make my vision better, cause such an obvious and distracting distortion to my vision? But no further explanation was given, and I didn’t know enough about vision correction to know how to ask deeper questions.

Then something came to mind: During my first examination, three or four weeks earlier, the eye doc had mentioned, just sort of off hand, that I had a bit of an astigmatism. I don’t know anything about astigmatism other than it’s some form of “blurry vision.” My vision is blurry, (up close), and that’s the reason I was at the eye doc, so hearing the word didn’t really register as anything unusual to hear at the time. But I was grasping at straws to figure out my problem.

“Does astigmatism cause distortion like this?” I asked.

The salesrep nodded, “The correction in the lenses can do that depending on the angle of the astigmatism.”

I stood there staring at the salesrep for several seconds. “So this trapezoidal shaping is caused by the astigmatism correction in these lenses?” I asked.

“Yeah,” he said. “Most people get used to it pretty quickly.”

I couldn’t believe this shit. Through all these conversations, with me complaining about the trapezoidal distortion, with two salesreps and a doctor, no one thought to explain to me that it was due to astigmatism correction. I had told them all that this was my first pair of eyeglasses, so they should have gathered that I wouldn’t know how corrective lenses work.

“So,” I started, “if you take out the astigmatism correction from these lenses, the trapezoidal distortion would go away?”

“Yes,” the salesrep said.

I stood there a few seconds, thinking, I can’t believe I’ve actually got to say this myself. “Well, let’s take out the astigmatism correction.”

The salesrep wrote up the order and I left the store to wait another week. When I returned to pick up the latest version of my glasses, they were just reading lenses with no trapezoidal distortion. Yay!

But originally, I had wanted progressive lenses so I could wear them all the time and not put them on and take them off constantly. Now that I learned that the one and only complaint I had had with the previous attempts was nothing to do with the progressive lenses, I was wondering if I should go back and give the progressives another try. But that would mean reordering and having to wait another week for the process. I was tired of this whole damn thing, so I just said, “These are fine,” and I left.

I lived with those glasses for over two years, putting them on and taking them off as needed. But lately, I’ve noticed some more blurriness in my vision. Either I need a slightly stronger magnification or the lack of astigmatism correction has started to be more noticeable. I decided to go to another eye doc for an updated examination and prescription.

Bullgrit