#i booked an appointment to get my new prescription tho we r so back | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

fuck-customers · 6 years

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Long post: TL;DR at the end!

I work at a very popular opticians in England and, although I'm quite new, what I'm about to tell you about has happened a number of time and I'm still amazed it does. I'll talk about the first time tho bc it was honestly the worst. So a lady came in to collect her new glasses. She puts them on, we check the vision, she can read perfectly with them, check the fit. All good, all happy, so we send her away with them. I'm gonna call her Mrs. S for the rest of this. That night, at maybe 5:20, so about 10 minutes before we close, we get a phone call and it's Mrs. S. You know it's gonna be an exciting situation when they start their phone call or visit with 'so I picked up my glasses today'. And this is how the phone call went: Mrs. S: 'So I picked up my glasses today and they were fine earlier but now I can't see with them at all!' Me: 'Oh, that's odd! Can I take your information so I can just find your record on our system and have a look at the glasses we've done for you?' She gives me her info, and I find that she picked up her glasses today indeed. A pair of reading glasses. Me: 'So what exactly is the issue you're having?' Mrs. S: 'Well they're fine when I'm reading, but then when I look up, everything is blurry!' It took about 30 seconds of awkward silence for me to process what she'd actually said to me. Me: 'So. Your reading glasses. They work perfectly for reading. But you can't see anything else with them.' Mrs. S: 'Yes!' Me, probably a bit too sarcastically: 'And you're aware they're.. reading glasses?' Mrs. S: 'Of course I am! What difference does that make?' Me: 'Well, they're reading glasses. They have your near vision prescription in them for close up work.. Like reading.' Mrs. S: 'But why can't I see everything with them? The prescription must be wrong!' Me: 'You have three prescriptions, your near, intermediate and distance and the only way to get glasses that have all three in them is if you get varifocals, or bifocals if you wanted just distance and near. Or we could have done you a distance pair as well as your reading. Were you told about this before?' Mrs. S: 'Yes, but the vari things were ridiculously expensive and I didn't want two pairs so I didn't want any of those!' Me: 'I'm afraid without upgrading to a varifocal lens, there's no way we can make you see at all distances with your reading glasses.' Mrs. S: 'So you just want me to give you more money. This is ridiculous, I want to speak to a manager right now!' The closest thing to a manager we had in store at that time was our store director, who's also our dispensing optician. I'll call her R. So I put Mrs. S on hold and explain to R what the situation was. She also had to take a good while to process what happened before taking the call. She took a good 20 minutes explaining to Mrs. S about why she needed three different prescriptions and how it's not 'all a scheme to swindle more money out of me!!!'. I'll explain here as well for people who don't know, but when you get older, you get 'presbyopic', which means that over time, the lenses in your eyes hardens so they struggles to focus properly on things at different distances, so you need a prescription for distance, intermediate (computer distance, essentially) and reading. If it wasn't obvious, Mrs. S was a just-past-middle-aged lady. So, after explaining this two or three times and Mrs. S still refusing varifocals, the conversation too a fun turn: R: 'Look, we are closed now, so how about I book you an appointment to come and see me tomorrow and we can talk this through properly and work out what's best for you.' Mrs. S: 'Well, I'd rather see someone who's actually qualified, like an optician.' R, after taking a second or two to control her seething anger: 'Ma'am. I am a fully qualified dispensing optician. You can come and see me.' The phone went oddly quiet after this. But Mrs. S booked her appointment and came in the next day. It took another 5 or so rounds of explaining for her to finally understand that it was a distance pair or varifocals, and she begrudgingly ended up buying varifocals because it would be too much of a hassle for her poor self to switch between two pairs of glasses all the time. Then when she came to collect her new varifocals, she spent the whole collection telling us about how much she spent on them. Yep, that's nice. You can see everything? Good. Now please get out my shop and hopefully take your business elsewhere. Trouble with being the cheapest optician on the high street, they tend to come crawling back to you. TL;DR: lady just couldn't understand why she couldn't see all around with her READING glasses, yelled over the phone and me and our dispensing optician and ended up buying the more expensive solution bc she hates hassle. Ironic.

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