My new glasses arrived today from Clearly Contacts (their website seems to be unavailable as I write this). Because these new glasses use my actual current prescription I can see rather well with them, though it might also be because they’re fresh and new with no scratches.
Backup glasses.
My regular glasses have a slightly out of date prescription, and some surface wear, but I love them dearly, and the optometrist says they’re OK.
I’m wearing the new pair as I type this so I can prove to myself that I can work while wearing them. That’s because their function is actually to be backup specs. My post Sometimes you see better without glasses explains how and why I felt I needed backups.
These glasses aren’t actually a style I’d normally wear. I bought them purely on price. They were the cheapest ones I could find, as I hope I don’t ever actually have to wear them.
This pair is huge and very thick at the edges. They don’t have a non-reflective coating so I had to angle them just right for the photo attached to this post.
My usual glasses.
I suspect they don’t fit quite exactly right — I have to move my head to get just the right spot to focus on some things. But that’s what you get with cheapie specs from the Internet. My main specs were properly fitted by a professional who spent 15 minutes or more ensuring they were set up correctly.
The choices at Clearly Contacts were just fine and the ordering process was pretty easy. I was lucky enough to also get the frames free, thanks to a timely tweet by spanishmanners providing a discount code. All up, I paid around NZ$110, and these are progressive lenses.
I selected the cheapest shipping method, so there was a lag of around 2 or 3 weeks between order and delivery. They arrived nicely packaged with a very sturdy glasses case and microfibre slipcase, along with a microfibre cleaning cloth and tiny screwdriver. All very nice.
The specs themselves had little plastic ‘stickers’ on the lenses. I looked through the glasses and found I could see a nice circle — like when you look through binoculars and get them just right so you see one circle, rather than two. Then I removed the ‘stickers’. I guess they were more like decals as there was no sticky subtsance.
Then I dug down into the box to look at the 3 sheets of paper at the bottom. The second piece of paper told me not to remove the stickers until I’d followed a particular procedure to check that my glasses were correctly positioned on my face. Too late. Maybe in future they should put a warning note at the top of the box.
The packing slip at the bottom of the box advised me to Please check to ensure the products you have received match your order prior to opening the boxes
. Oops.
My verdict: for only a little over $100 I have a perfectly acceptable, if rather ugly, pair of glasses I can use for working on my computer and general purposes. These should be fine as backups.
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