Beth went to pick up her new glasses yesterday, and since mine were ready as well, picked up mine too so I could try them out, and go in on Saturday if there were any problems.
I tried them out today, but have to admit that by about 4pm I was just frustrated with them and swapped back to my existing battered old pair with scratched lenses.
There are actually several problems, the first is that the right arm is a little too short, so is a bit uncomfortable. However more of a problem is that my left eye is having a lot of trouble adapting, and seems to be working significantly harder than it has done. Most of the time my left eye feels blurred, and then when I close the right eye it does eventually focus. There is some enevitable adaption to a new prescription, but it is somewhat concerning how much extra work my left eye appears to be doing – plus the fact that it doesn’t seem to focus until I concentrate on it.
From a bit of research on the Internet the third problem might be more complicated, and that is that at the periphery of the lense I get quite noticable fringing. Several comments on the Internet say that they have been told that this is normal with high power lenses, however apparently my prescription has got less powerful, my old glasses don’t do it, and the assistant in the shop told me that I had the same sort of lenses in my old glasses. Anyway, on the basis that my old glasses don’t have the problem I really don’t see what advantage there is in screwing up the clarity of my periphery vision.
The final problem is more a conflict of fashion over practicality. Basically the majority of current styles are fairly narrow in terms of height. When we were in the opticians I was told that my current frames were deeper than was fashionable, so after persuasion I ended up going for a style with less depth. However from a practicality purpose they are a pain, especially when working on a PC, as my fingers and the keyboard are below the bottom of my glasses, I effectively have a useless area of vision because the glasses don’t go deep enough. Much to Beth’s frustration, even if they sort out the new glasses, which she does think I look a lot better in, I think I’ll still go and get another pair in similar frames to my current pair, that will allow me to actually work as I want to. Of course the same missing bit is also the area I use to read the music when I’m singing out.
To be frank, fashion is not all that high on my list of priorities. My glasses are a tool that allows me to drive, work, sing in the choir and so on. Having lack of clarity in my periphery vision is a problem when driving, as I use those areas of the lense for looking at the mirrors in particular. To sing out properly in the choir I can’t look down into my book, so I need the same missing bit of glass that I use to look at the keyboard when typing. Specsavers do offer a Customer Promise:
We want you to be completely happy with your purchase at Specsavers Opticians.
If you have any concerns within six months of the date of purchase, we will put it right. No quibble, no fuss.
It will be interesting to see quite how far they will go to make me completely happy. It would be nice if I could change the frames, but I doubt they’d go that far, as to some extent I made my own choice. However I certainly expect that with new glasses my vision should be better and clearer than with the old pair.
