HARD TIMES:Buying a pair of prescription glasses online worked out to be a cheap but nasty option
I’VE BEEN buying things online for a decade. It started with CDs and books, then came flights, groceries, concert tickets, banking and more.
I became an enthusiastic advocate for e-commerce, encouraging others not to be afraid. Things were cheaper, or at least handier, and my credit card details were never stolen.
It hadn’t occurred to me that you could buy glasses over the internet until I read about it. As I was very annoyed that the glasses I spent Aus$601 (€300) on 20 months ago already needed replacing, I felt it was worth looking into.
The prices at the site I went to were great and the choice of frames looked pretty good. With far lower overheads on rent and manufacturing and no salespeople to pay, the savings were passed onto the customer.
The multicoated option with the thinnest lenses and a nice frame were going to cost the equivalent of €41 through a US website. The only problem was the prescription – having your eyes tested can only be done in person.
The logical option was to go to my optometrist to get my last prescription, but this filled me with dread. The guy who manages the shop (he’s not an optometrist) is a pushy, overbearing character who charges whatever he can get away with. I figured he’d smell an online rat and be reluctant to give up my prescription without a fight.
So I decided to make up a story that I was heading back to Ireland for a holiday and needed the prescription in case my glasses broke while at home. It sounded plausible, but my seven year old, Grace, was with me.
To prevent her from saying: “I didn’t know you were going home for a holiday daddy, can I come?” when I told my story, I forewarned her that it wasn’t true and not to say anything. “Why?” she asked, not unreasonably.
Try explaining the bargains to be had in online glasses shopping to a seven year old if you have an hour to spare. Which I didn’t, so I just said: “I’ll explain later. After we leave the shop. You can have a milkshake.”
I didn’t feel good about making her an accomplice, or the deception, or the bribery, but there was a bargain to be had.
We walked into the shop and Mr Crusty was nowhere to be seen. I told the stand-in behind the counter my name and said I needed my prescription. As I began my inter-continental travel spiel he printed my prescription and warned me it was time to have another test done. “This is all I need?” I asked. “That’s all you need.”
It was all I needed but it still took hours to figure out what was what as the terms used on my Australian prescription were slightly different to what they asked for on the American website. Wikipedia provided a helping hand but pupillary distance – the length, in millimetres, between the centre of your pupils – didn’t seem to be on my prescription.
There followed an hour of trying to measure this distance myself by making marks on my glasses, a piece of paper and the mirror. A frantic search for Grace’s school ruler ensued. My estimates varied wildly (well, by millimetres), and I had read that getting the pupillary distance wrong can cause headaches, so it was time to engage a third party.
If “can you measure the distance between the centre of my pupils in millimetres” isn’t the most romantic thing a man can say to a woman, then I don’t know what is.
I later realised pupillary distance was on my prescription, cunningly disguised as PD. It also divided it into PD left and PD right, whereas the website wanted the sum total. My PD measurement was beyond the figures described as “normal” on the site. Being called a freak by a cheap glasses website is surprisingly hurtful. But I thought of the price and got over it.
Two weeks later the glasses arrived.
With a return address of Farukh, Karachi, Pakistan.
In a package wrapped in stitched cloth and sealed with wax.
In the movies it would have contained a block of heroin. My package just contained an enormous pair of glasses.
They were in a Dolce Gabbana case, but the glasses themselves were not DG, more NHS.
The prescription seems to be exactly right, but the glasses make me look like either of the Two Ronnies. Or a welder.
My daughter gave a running commentary.
“They’re big.”
“They’re huge.”
“They’re enormous.”
Looking at the size of the case they came in, she said “you won’t be able to fit that in your pocket”.
Her mum entered the room and the fray. “You havin’ a laugh? He’s havin’ a laugh,” she said, as if I’d morphed into a Ricky Gervais character.
“They’re not so bad, you’ll get used to them,” I lied. “I’m wearing them to work.”
“Oh don’t. You can’t,” she said. “Strangers will point at you.”
The first person I met at work said I looked like Brains from Thunderbirds.
When I ordered them I spent so much time ensuring I entered the prescription correctly, it didn’t occur to me that the frame being a few centimetres wider and taller than my previous glasses would make all that much difference. But a few centimetres is, well, enormous when it comes to a pair of glasses. Size matters.
Caveat emptor.
