There was a time when you walked into an optometrist with your glasses on, had your eyesight checked, and if you needed updated glasses, had a new pair of lenses popped into the existing frames. I mean, who needs updated frames unless you're an Elton John or Dame Edna Everage?
Not anymore! I was told on more than one occasion that popping new lenses into old frames would cost even more than buying completely new frames - starting at several hundred dollars to the-sky-is-the-limit! - which is optometrist-speak and translates into something like "There's not enough money in it for me to simply change your lenses, so unless you're going to buy completely new frames, don't ever bother me!"
Things seem to have got worse since then, because the other day I popped into Specsavers in Batemans Bay where I had bought a pair of reading glasses only a couple of years earlier, and one of the lenses had ever so slightly popped out of the frame - not by much and it wasn't loose but it just needed a tiny notch to get it safely back into place.
The place was swarming with "assistants" in their fashionable airhostess-like Specsavers uniforms looking down at their folded hands or up at the ceiling because I was the only customer and there was nothing else for them to do - surely, this must be another one of those government-subsidised employment schemes where the subsidy exceeds the wages costs - and yet I had to wait for a while before one of them approached me to ask how she could help and to whom I explained my problem.
She took my glasses and disappeared behind a screen - whether to check my glasses or her sales manual, I don't know - only to reappear minutes later to give me a "No, sorry!" but that she could sell me completely new frames, presumably into which she would pop those same lenses she couldn't re-pop into my old glasses. Where had I heard that before?
Only looking back on my way out did I realise what their real business was. I wonder if I can bring my own tissues or have to buy theirs!
