I went to the optometrist yesterday to whine that my new glasses (that I got in September; there’s been a long delay between appointments with her) don’t work when I’m sitting at my desktop computer. Either I lean way forward to within a foot of the screen to use the bifocal section of the glasses or I sit five feet back where I can’t reach the keyboard and use the other part of the glasses.

I wondered if the lensmaker had just gotten the prescription wrong, but the doctor checked that and said that wasn’t the problem. Then she looked at the old glasses which I’d gotten at least six years ago and exclaimed “why is the bifocal half-moon so low on these lenses?” It turns out that the new ones, which are half-rims and fairly narrow, have the bifocal section at an appropriate height, while the bifocal sections on the old ones are a few centimeters below the mid-line of the lens.

She suggested either trifocals, progressive lenses, or a pair of single-vision glasses to be used only on the computer. After some discussion we decided that since the new ones I have in hand are just fine for use everywhere but in the office I should just get a “computer-only” pair.

Okay. After all that preamble I went out today at about 1:15pm to go see the Costco or Wal-Mart optical shops and see what the price might be for single-vision glasses. Ha!

This is what I ran into, right at the bottom of the hill. See all those cars heading screen-left? That’s the direction I was trying to go.

After fifteen minutes and a quarter-mile I got mad and said to myself, “I’ll cut over to the other road going that way.” It’s about another quarter-mile to that other road using a residential cross street. Good grief. It took fifteen more minutes just to make it to the other road. At that point I said “I’m goin’ home.”

And I did.