“Professional” tips for adjusting glasses and spectacles bought online

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About the only limitation when purchasing your new glasses online is that if the fit isn’t just perfect, you are potentially faced with the prospect of having to adjust the glasses frames yourself.
There are many obscure tools for adjusting your glasses, some used to a lesser or greater extent by the opticians on the high street.
Here we explore one of the most common spectacles adjustment processes.A chap once said to me “With all of your years in optics you must have secrets, some possibly even a trifle guilty, which you have never revealed. How about telling, perhaps even publishing some of them?”

“Certainly not , I riposted, those secrets, especially the guilty ones will go with me to the grave. Such revelation would implicate not only me but also my friends and colleagues of many years.”

“What do you think would induce me to perpetrate such a disgraceful betrayal” I asked.

“Money?” he replied.

“Right first time” I confirmed.

And so I am prepared to reveal, not all, certainly not for a mere thirty pieces of silver, but just one of the many deceptions visited on a daily basis upon the unsuspecting and wholly trusting members of the public.

“My glasses are a little uncomfortable, could you adjust them for me” requests the unsuspecting and wholly trusting member of the public (hereinafter, in the interest of brevity, referred to as the u&wtmotp).

“Certainly, Sir/Madam” replies the courteous and diligent optician.

/Aside/ “they look alright to me, not much I can do to improve them.” And there begins the universal and long established, but totally reprehensible, gentle art of the BENCH REST. The courteous and diligent optician removes the offending spectacles from the u&wtmotp takes them into the back office , out of sight of the aforementioned u&wtmotp, places them carefully on a bench and allows them to rest for a few minutes. After a suitable pause he returns to the showroom and with great concern and just a hint of histrioncs returns them to their rightful place on the face of the u&wtmotp carefully checking with a light touch and painstaking observation that they are exactly as they shoul be.

“How do they feel now” comes the rhetorical question .

“Oh much better, thank you very much, quite comfortable, excellent, Thank you, thank you, good day”.

There is something very rewarding about a job where one’s skill and experience can bring such satisfaction to a grateful public.

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This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 25th, 2009 at 3:31 pm and is filed under Just For Fun. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

6 Responses to ““Professional” tips for adjusting glasses and spectacles bought online”

  1. Nigel Jelks Says:
    March 26th, 2009 at 6:10 pm

    dissapointing article - as a spec user for work for reading, my glasses often get bent slightly, sometimes even mangled. Would have been handy to know whether the bridge should be right up close to the face; whether the arms should be dead at right angles to the lens; and how do you get a longer fit to the arms, should the back of the arms est right on the back of the ears, or just touch in places etc…
    and where does one buy a robust cross-headed screwdriver that actually does turn the screws - the cheapo sets dont work. NJ

  2. Nigel Jelks Says:
    March 26th, 2009 at 6:12 pm

    article does not give the answers that I was lookin for ;as a spec user for work for reading, my glasses often get bent slightly, sometimes even mangled. Would have been handy to know whether the bridge should be right up close to the face; whether the arms should be dead at right angles to the lens; and how do you get a longer fit to the arms, should the back of the arms est right on the back of the ears, or just touch in places etc…
    and where does one buy a robust cross-headed screwdriver that actually does turn the screws - the cheapo sets dont work. NJ

  3. Nigel Jelks Says:
    March 26th, 2009 at 6:12 pm

    as a spec user for work for reading, my glasses often get bent slightly, sometimes even mangled. Would have been handy to know whether the bridge should be right up close to the face; whether the arms should be dead at right angles to the lens; and how do you get a longer fit to the arms, should the back of the arms est right on the back of the ears, or just touch in places etc…
    and where does one buy a robust cross-headed screwdriver that actually does turn the screws - the cheapo sets dont work. NJ

  4. Nigel Jelks Says:
    March 26th, 2009 at 6:12 pm

    bollocks

  5. Jan Altus Says:
    May 20th, 2009 at 4:09 am

    As regards Nigel Jelks’s message timed at March 26th, 2009 at 6:12 pm. I couldn’t have phrased it better myself!

    My advice is to heat the arm of your specs in a mug of boiling water for a few minutes before trying to adjust it. If you try to adjust it whilst cold you risk snapping it.

    Do the adjustments in front of a good mirror with bright lighting. If the specs are sitting in an asymmetric fashion on your face, they may be incorrectly working on your eyes; eventually causing eyestrain and headaches.

    Good High Street opticians will adjust and repair specs (often for free) regardless of where you purchased them from.

  6. Mark Bowden Says:
    May 20th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

    I find a hair dryer works well - we use a “professional” one (although I think it just costs more !)

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