I don't wear my glasses often, mostly for driving. Yet, despite the unfamiliarity with them, I gathered that something was wrong the other day in the car when I put them on my face and a lens fell out. Well, that's not supposed to happen.
Turned out I lost a little tiny screw that held the rim together. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Fortunately my wife has multiple kinds of spectacles and we've acquired a few of those glasses-repair kits over the years, some of which have those completely useless plastic magnifying glasses. I'm glad that I'm nearsighted rather than farsighted, because if I were farsighted I would need my glasses to fix my glasses.
Surely there is no common task more suited to making a man feel like a fumble-fingered fool than fixing eyeglasses. The screws are less than 2 mm long -- for reference, an inch is 25.4 mm. I don't care who you are, that's hard to handle with adult fingers. I don't have large hands -- size 10 wedding ring -- but I feel like I'm wearing baseball mitts on both while doing this job.
But with time and patience, neither of which are my friends, I was able to get the screw secured at last. The lens stayed in place all the next day while on a drive to Pennsylvania, accompanied by dog Izzy.
It's satisfying to get a tricky repair completed. Although with my history of handiwork, it's always on the back of my mind that the repair will fail -- in this case, that the screw will shoot out and somehow get on my eyeball, that the lens will drop off my face and be consumed by the dog. Well, it might wind up giving him good hindsight.
3 comments:
Dude, your hands are huge!
Mrs. PLW: "Dear, can you replace the lamp in the kitchen exhaust hood over the range?"
Me, 90 minutes later, dripping perspiration, arms shaking and back aching from contortions, fingertips numb, and still wearing a headlamp: "Sure, piece of cake".
I was severely nearsighted growing up. I had my cataracts removed a few years ago. The doc asked if I wanted my new, internal, lenses set to farsighted or one near and one far. I chose both to be far.
I would need reading glasses, but I figured what the hey.
So, had my eyes done and then it struck me that without the cheaters I no longer could read in bed (BiPAP mask so can't wear glasses). Nor work at my computer. And so forth.
When the screw popped out of my reading glasses, I had to get my wife to find the little screw and put it back in.
Humbug.
I have learned that I can use my cell phone camera as a magnifying glass, though, and that's helped me out several times.
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