Thursday, March 12, 2009

The Lost Contact Lens

I believe it is advisable to hang on to as much money as you can for retirement. With this precept in mind, I worked hard at saving money this morning.

Unfortunately I made the mistake of passing the mirror as I was getting ready to go to the park. What a fright! I looked like a myopic chicken. At least, I told myself, put your contact lenses in. So I went to the bathroom, and who should follow me but Miss Mouth, Simone the whippet, who likes to whine whenever I am there. I was just rinsing my right lens in the washbasin with the stopper that has never worked properly, when Simone gave a particularly annoying whine. I turned around to tell her to zip it, and--bam--my right lens went straight down the plughole. Ha! Losing a bifocal gas permeable lens is not like losing a soft lens. I was probably looking at a couple of hundred dollars down the drain.

Knowing next to nothing about plumbing, I had heard of a sink trap and suspected that the lens was lurking in there, stuck in a melange of grease and hair. If only I could get to it, I could possibly save all that money, and avoid having to appear before the world in thick spectacles for a couple of days. In the park I ran into my friend T, who is great at fixing things, and asked her if she had a pipe wrench I could borrow. She kindly dropped off a couple of same on her way to work.

I cleared out the stuff in the cupboard under the sink and got cracking. Exerting all the strength of my highly toned biceps, I cracked a nut into three pieces while undoing the j-bend. No matter, I thought. A trickle of water fell into the bowl I had carefully placed beneath the pipe. There it was! My lens, as good as new!
I cleaned the precious little thing and placed it back in its case, then went to Greschlers plumbing supply at the end of my block for a replacement sink trap. It cost $14.63. I went back to work in the narrow cupboard under the sink.

Using all my patience and reading the directions over and over for forty minutes I am still not able to figure out how this thing is supposed to fit together without yanking the pipe out of the wall. So let's see--pay the plumber or call the optician next time. Which will it be?
Simone says she's very sorry.

7 comments:

  1. This is so, I'm sorry to say, funny. MYOPIC CHICKEN??! I would do exactly the same thing! UGH!

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  2. At least Simone did not swallow your contact. When I was in college, I lost one permanently (and these were the days when they cost much more) to a dog named Hanky. Actually I was relieved because I hated the damn things and couldn't get up the nerve to tell my mother we had made a $300 mistake (especially considering that I had made such an incredible case for getting the things to begin with).

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  3. Good Lord, Joy, I am having so much fun reading your blog. This is such a treat!

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  4. Ba-a-a-d dog, Simone! Ba-a-a-d dog!

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  5. next time PLEASE call me, I have more tools (and some experience) then you can shake (or throw) a stick at!!! Really, seriously.

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  6. Next time PLEASE call me, I have more tools (and some expertise) then you can shake (or throw) a stick at!!! REALLY!!!

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  7. You can save some money by buying contacts from online outlets. They often have discount prices and special offers.

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Anglo-Brooklyn by Joy Holland is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.