Jack my price up!

I bought some new glasses back in October because on the old pair, the stem just kinda… snapped off. One moment, it was tucked behind my ear. The next moment, it was sitting in my hand. For a week or two, I was fulfilling yet another geek stereotype—I had tape holding my glasses together—but since it was behind my ear, no one could appreciate the irony.

So I got a new frame to replace the old one and it was expensive. Then the lenses cost extra because my eyes are all sorts of screwed up (I’m near-sighted and my eyes don’t focus in the same place, so without my glasses or if I get tired, I get double vision). I tried doing the math, but it scares me. Seriously. Even if you had a well-paying job, it could have taken a week to pay for these suckers. Or a month. Or a year and a half. (That last one kinda depends on whether you’re working in the U.S. or doing IT in India…) And then to top it off, I got magnetic clip-on sunglasses for about $70. Ouch.

In my experience, sunglasses clips are rebellious by nature. I went on a trip to Florida to visit some friends and I was using it on the second-to-last day, but by the time I got home, it had escaped. I don’t remember taking it out of my pocket and my friend looked all over his apartment, but alas, to no avail: that sucker was gone. The second one worked just fine until I accidentally left it in the pocket of my shorts and sent it through the washing machine. Maybe that wasn’t an act of rebellion so much as revenge—it apparently wanted me to know that I shouldn’t make it suffer that kind of abuse, so part of the UV coating on only one lens had rubbed off. I could still wear them, but looking through them looked like I had globs of eye boogers on my eyelashes.

The third clip didn’t rebel, it just didn’t fit quite right. The other two sat pretty even with the lenses of the glasses, but these leaned in at the top and away at the bottom. It was a minor nuisance, but since I spent such a large chunk of money to get them, they should fit juuuuuust right, dammit! So I went back to the shop last week (for the umpteenth time) and asked them to adjust the clip so it would sit evenly on the glasses. When the guy turned around to work on them, I didn’t see a pipe wrench or power drill in his hands, which might have been why he couldn’t fix them. I always find that if something doesn’t fit quite right, try a ball peen hammer first. If it still doesn’t work, it ain’t comin’ back out, which would have justified their next decision.

Apparently, the sunglasses clips are made at the same time as the pairs of glasses they attach to. Consequently, the first clip you get will be fine, but any subsequent replacements might not fit properly. To ensure the proper fit for my next clip, they weren’t gonna use a “try, try again” method—they wanted to replace the entire frame. Remember how much the frames cost in the first place? Of course you don’t! I didn’t tell you because they were obscenely expensive! And now they wanted to replace it with a brand new obscenely expensive frame instead of a new not-quite-as-obscenely expensive sunglasses clip! (If the glasses hadn’t been under warranty and they wanted to make me pay for any of it… they’ve got lens cleaner—I’m sure that stuff could take care of blood stains fairly well.)

Thus, I brought in my old glasses, they switched the lenses from the old frame to the new frame and now I have a pair of mostly-functional glasses again. Unfortunately, they don’t fit as well anymore, so I’ll probably be pulling and bending them around for the next couple weeks until it finally feels like they aren’t gonna slide off my face if my head droops in sorrow when I remember how much I paid for them, yet how freely those people shipped in another frame just because the sunglasses didn’t fit quite right. Then again, if the new frame did hit the floor and break, it might be in a place where people would notice the tape holding it together…