Sunday 21^st January 2024

Good News: Though I took the last seventeen days off from adding anything to this site, it turns out that's not a lot of time.
Know how I know? Because, seventeen days ago, on the Fourth, I mentioned first that this website is now [somehow] twenty-seven years old; also, I mentioned that I'd gone into LensCrafters to get new lenses in my sunglasses, which they couldn't exactly do because they now send out for replacement lenses from somewhere the hell else.

You can go wait next door, at Blockbuster Video....

Nothing to get too pissed about, I suppose. Because the whole reason they can't get things done onsite is that they're far too good at getting things done offsite: the equipment turning an hour into seventeen days for the sake of progress takes up some small island nation of child slave labour or whatever. But then the new lenses would get mailed here to Denver, where they'd take an hour after all to grind them into shape and screw them into the frames.
That's the cost of getting the best, or something.
And of course I got to keep my shades the whole time. The ones marginally out of presciption, five years after I'd last bothered going in for an exam. There was a pandemic for a while there. But then the world ragequit the deadliest plague in the history of the human animal without first curing it, so you all get to go out and lick each other again. Rumour has it you can even walk on a beach alone without getting arrested in the modern world.

This is still the funniest thing I've seen this decade.

Anyway: last night, around sunset, just as I'd been starting to wonder if the cops had arrested LensCrafters for walking alone on a beach or something, they finally called me to let me know that my lenses were in—whenever I wanted to, I could drive down to the mall with my shades and hand them over for an hour and that would be that.
Of course, they told me that when it was twenty degrees out. So I put it off until today.
Today, I waited until it was fifty degrees, and drove down to the mall. Parked the car; went into LensCrafters; told them why I was there.
Quick glance at the computer, and the receptionist mentioned with some alacrity that, because the lenses had been cut to shape off at whatever Legion of Doom Volcano Base, it'd only be about ten minutes to install them; I could just wait there until they were ready. So, okay.
Waited there until they were ready. Close to ten minutes, in fact.
Except for the part where they weren't ready. Because, in those eight minutes, someone very clever had lined up the new lenses with my sunglasses and discovered that, while my RayBan New Wayfarers are fifty-two millimetres, some goof off at the Most. Advanced. LensCrafting. Paedophile. Island. Evar. had ground them to fifty-five millimetres.
That is to say that, after seventeen days and eight minutes, someone had noticed that the new lenses were too big to fit my preexisting frames.
Let's take a minute to go all the way back to a few paragraphs ago, when it'd only be ten minutes if they were already shaped to fit; otherwise, it'd still be an hour, like in the old days, but plus seventeen days.
So, now, after eight minutes of discovering that fifty-five is more than fifty-two, they're going to spend the next hour grinding my new lenses to fit my frames, like they'd told me would happen back on the Fourth.
Not really. In fact, because the only people employed at LensCrafters in Denver take eight minutes to deduce that 55 on the TenKey is a typo for 52, they're gonna have Cobra-la start over from zilch. But the new lenses should be here in Denver in a couple more weeks...plus ten minutes to an hour to install them, halfway through February.
I may have looked disappointed. Because the LensCrafter telling me all this suddenly gets a bright idea: since I've got 55mm lenses for 52mm RayBans, the obvious solution is to grab a 55mm frame, stick the lenses in there, and solve the problem for the moment by handing me those as a loaner pair.
Not really. In fact, that whole thing was proposed, but also they want a hundred and sixty bucks for the frames because it's hardly their fault that it's their fault.
What the hell ever. Gi'me back my RayBans from 2010; call me when a grownup gets hired and figures out how to make lenses in about a sixth of a year.
That's pretty much the punchline. Three weeks after learning that LensCrafters no longer possess the competence to get anything done in about an hour, I get to wait another three weeks to see if they've figured out the precision to make the lenses I already paid four hundred bucks for, three weeks ago, on January the Fourth.
I'm not all that hopeful.
Incidentally, I somewhat whimsically hit zenni.com a couple weeks ago, since I had the presciption written down. Punched that in [even managed to type 52 instead of 55, for I am awesome] and got a backup pair of glasses for forty-odd bucks. Of course, then, there was a significant blizzard, followed by an insignificant holiday; so, although those were supposed to get here on Saturday the Thirteenth, they got bumped to Tuesday the Sixteenth. And therefore got here five days and three weeks before LensCrafters did anything more than try to fool me into buying new frames.
So, if you need glasses, I'd argue for zenni.com over LensCrafters: sure, they're cheaper; but they're also faster. I guess there's not a downside. I'm not use to writing sentences without downsides in them.
Have a webcomic:

More later....
—Gremlin