I would like to take a quick poll here. How many people take a shower while wearing glasses? Absolutely no one? That’s what I thought. So why do hotels put two tiny identical bottles of shampoo and conditioner in the shower and then use impossible-to-read three-point micro font to label the bottles? I can’t be the only person who stands in the shower, squinting and staring at these stupid things trying to determine which of the two bottles has shampoo in it. Since 64 percent of adults in America wear glasses, that means more than half of our population is standing in a hotel shower, wasting water during a drought, as they are perplexed by the tiny labeling on these bottles.
California legislators make a lot of strange laws about things I really don’t care about. This year it became illegal for a dog to chase a bear; yes, that is actually a brand new law our legislators worked diligently to pass in this state. Now here is a great opportunity for those legislators we elected to do something actually useful, something that can actually improve life for a lot of people. Everybody who is wearing glasses and is reading this should write their local legislator and tell him or her that we want mandatory large-font, easy-to-read shampoo bottle labeling in every hotel, motel, and holiday inn. This request of mine may sound like the political ranting of some old codger. Well, it sounds that way because something recently happened to me that is pushing me a bit closer to codgerdom; I lost my perfect vision.
You see (pun intended), I’m the kind of guy who likes to lie to himself. It isn’t something I do intentionally. Like most men, I just tend to ignore facts and refuse to face the truth about things that may send me to the doctor’s office. A little while back, I noticed my eyes seemed to tire, which made it tougher to read books. Instead of getting my eyes checked, I just solved the problem by not reading books anymore and buying a bigger screen TV. Problem solved.
Well, the problem wasn’t solved. One of my kids wasn’t feeling good, so I went to the store to buy some medicine. Labeling for medicine dosages and other important life-threatening things is always printed in a ridiculously small font. I was having a tough time trying to figure out what medicine to get for my ill child. I was standing in the aisle, frustrated with the fact that I couldn’t read what I was looking at, and that was when it hit me. I had a problem that needed to be solved. So I decided to fix the problem by having my wife, whom I love, go to the store to buy the medicine. She already wears glasses.
I continued to blow smoke up my own butt and ignore the fact that I needed glasses. Then, while tinkering in the garage on the racecar, I got annoyed because I couldn’t read a fuse panel underneath the dashboard. That was the tipping point. Forget about purchasing medicine for the kids, or reading books, I could work around those trivial items in life, but my poor eyesight was limiting my ability to make the racecar faster. That was completely unacceptable.
I went to an ophthalmologist to get my eyes checked. The first thing I noticed was that the ophthalmologist was younger than I was. That was strange. When did doctors, people who went to school for a decade, get to be younger than me? I wondered if it was his first day on the job. I informed the young man that I didn’t need “glasses glasses,” I just needed some “garage glasses.” We went through the whole endless swapping lenses routine: “Which one is better, the first one or the second one?” They all looked pretty blurry to me. After the eye doctor version of Doogie Howser checked my eyes, he said, “You need to wear glasses all of the time.” He then went on to insult me and say, “Don’t worry. Your deteriorating vision is just a normal function of your age.” Whoa, young man! No need to get personal. I’m not even 40 years old yet. My age should not be limiting me at all, for anything, ever. I don’t want to get anywhere near the slippery slope of “a function of your age.” First it’s my eyes, and then the next thing I know I’ll be needing a prescription for Viagra. Ironically, I’ll need the glasses to read the dosage instructions on the Viagra box. I didn’t want to hear this kind of rhetoric. That was why I put off going to the doctor’s office in the first place. It’s always bad news at the doctor’s.
After I got my glasses prescription, I picked out some frames and started my new life as a glasses wearer. I immediately recognized I should have gone to the ophthalmologist a few years ago, regardless of the crappy news about the “function of my age.” I could see. I was wrong about vision being overrated. My life was clear again, and I could work on the racecar. I was really happy with my glasses until I went to work and everybody told me I looked just like Drew Carey. Nobody said I looked like Brad Pitt or Robert Downey, Jr.—both good looking gentlemen who occasionally wear glasses. No, I was told I look like an overweight comedian who is now hosting The Price is Right. I wonder if Drew takes Viagra.
Rob walked around for a half an hour looking for his new glasses. They were on top of his head.
This article appears in Aug 15-22, 2013.