First the eyes, then the knees, then....the mind!

Several years ago I was sprawled out on the floor of my living room reading a street map of Cincinnati and cursing. Muttering, "When did they start making these maps so small???!!" as I struggled to read the streets and make sense of a city, that quite frankly, didn't. It was with great reluctance and total denial that I began to suspect that my eyes were going!!

I had always been so vain about my good eyesight!

That was then. I did eventually go to an eye doctor and receive a pair of bona fide reading glasses. A couple of years later, my sister neglected to toss my suitcase in her car as she was taking me to the airport and ran over it! My first pair was greatly impaired.

It took me YEARS to return to the eye doctor and get another prescription. I had become hooked on the $1 glasses you could obtain from the Dollar Store. When you run them over with the car you think, "what the hell."

I actually got two pairs, one for reading and one for long distance. Because, now I needed bifocals.

Say it ain't so!!

The long distance pair I lost when we moved from Central KY to NE Indiana. They just never showed up at the new house. The reading glasses were always a thorn in my side as the lenses kept popping out of the frame! They were the smudgiest pair of glasses in the entire history of eye glass wear. Last year one of the arms broke. On occasion I will pop the lens back in, hook it over one ear, balance it on the bridge of my nose and see the way the Doc thought I should see.

Otherwise, it was those $1 glasses by the gross which I always got mixed up with Joe's who when ever he put a pair of mine on would say, "You really are blind, aren't you?"

This is how I found myself standing in the middle of a huge assembly line eye glass sweat shop looking around with my blurred vision for a sign that would lead me in the right direction.

I am turning into such a bitch.

My glasses would not be ready until hours later and I opted to pick them up the next morning.

When I get there, my glasses are not ready, they have to be sent out and will take two weeks.

"So much for the "same day" guarantee!" I quipped, with just enough edge that the poor customer service lady finally really looked me in the eye.

"Why the delay?"

"We have to send them out to get the gobbly gook stuff put on them so that you don't get the glare from the sun..." or something like that.

"I don't need it then, because I need those glasses to read." At this point, I needed those glasses immediately!!

OK, it will take 1/2 hour.

I came back three hours later and they could not find my glasses. Finally, the poor over worked Customer Service Lady came to grips with the situation and told me that in the process of making my glasses they had cracked one of the lenses and now would have to re-do them, take a seat and we will have them ready in a few minutes.

A good half hour later she called me over, away from the rest of the people in the large show- room/waiting room and told me my glasses could not be finished because the machine that puts a protective coating on the glass so I couldn't scratch them (do they have a coating for running them over?) has broken down.

I guess she thought I might blow.

All I could think about was when things went terribly wrong for me when I was working at The Beverage Company. And I took pity on her and told her I understood she was doing her job the best she could, and that it was the other people who were messing things up. I knew it took a lot of courage to give me the bad news and I had to give her a break.

For my acceptance of the situation and not causing a scene I got over 50 bucks knocked off the cost of the glasses and a free cleaning kit (14.99 retail).

And, the glasses are finally sitting on the bridge of my nose.

Not that much different from the $1 glasses, just cost 150 times more and I don't resemble a bug anymore.