iGlass Economics 101

It seems that people have a skewed relationship with how much money they spend on certain items versus how much care should be taken with said items. Many seem to think that the more money they spend on a pair of glasses, the more indestructible this makes them. Following is a graph to illustrate this point:



However, the amount of care taken with said high expense items creates an inverse correlation, meaning that the more money they spend, the worse they treat their glasses:



It needs to be noted that this rule only applies to very specific items. Most individuals would not normally spend tens of thousands of dollars on a vehicle (let’s say, for argument’s sake, a BMW) only to drive it off a cliff, or use it to demolish an old garage, or allow his or her child to drive it simply because the child wants to, and then go back to the BMW dealership and berate the salesperson because they spent $100 000 and the car should have been able to deal with the high speed impact on the boulders hundreds of feet below, and they now expect a full refund. What are you talking about? Of course they didn’t bring the car in so that the salesperson could see what sort of carnage (get it!?) was wrought. The salesperson should just take the customer who drove his car off the cliff at his word and give him a new one!

See? That sounds crazy! The expectation here is that the more money is spent on the BMW, the more care is taken of said BMW.

Glasses, however, are treated in a much more indelicate fashion. Following are some examples of the damage I have seen done to glasses:

• People adjusting their own glasses, heating them using hair dryers. (If you have never opened the hood of a car, would your first crack at carburetor repair be with your 6 month old Lexus?) Heat, by the way, destroys antiglare.

• Mothers allowing their children to play with their glasses (although seeing my sister with my nephew, I now kind of understand that one. New mothers don’t sleep a lot, and when the kid wants to play with something, he or she will definitely get his or her hands on that something. May as well just give it up willingly.)

• Glasses dropped in a garburator.

• Glasses cleaned in a dishwasher (I wish I was kidding.)

• Countless dog-on-glasses maulings (with several of them being the second, third, or even fourth incident for the same person with the same dog. They say old dogs can’t learn new tricks?)

And most of the time, the customer comes back to our store with purposeful stride and announces that we owe them a new pair of glasses or they want their money back. We hear the story of how this is the worst pair of glasses they have ever owned, how this sort of thing has never happened to them before and how we told them they are 100% scratch proof and demand to know why they should bring the glasses in, they’re in the garbage disposal dammit, they want some new ones!

Now, several of the statements made in the previous paragraph need to be dissected further;

-“scratch proof coating”; This should protect against your dog’s teeth? Really? REALLY? Your dog has chewed your couch, coffee table, TV, bed, toilet, sink, bathtub, and house foundation, but the tiny piece of metal and plastic for which you paid $500 that holds lenses on your face should be able to stand up to them because of the “scratch proof coating” that is applied to the lenses only? I must be underestimating the power of this stuff, and I think that NASA should consider coating the Space Shuttle with it.

-“this sort of thing has never happened before”; For those who say this, I would like to respond “Have you ever cleaned your glasses in the dishwasher before?” Of course this has never happened before! It’s because you’ve never done this to your glasses before!

-“100% scratch proof”; When selling glasses, we actually correct people who say “scratch proof coating” by saying “There’s no such thing as scratch proof. They are scratch resistant. “ The usual response? “Whatever. You know what I mean.” Do you know what you mean?

So what is it that causes this inversion of money spent / care taken with glasses? Scientists have posited several theories, but the leading theory goes something like this: Eyeglass lenses focus x-rays beamed to Earth by black holes directly into the cerebral cortex, causing the wearer of the lenses to suddenly go insane and want to destroy them. It is not uncommon to see these people bashing their faces into tree trunks or sticking their glasses into a blender. As soon as the glasses are destroyed, the customer loses all memory of why they thought it best to ruin their spectacles. The memories are sometimes replaced with something much more mundane, such as “I was wearing them and they suddenly exploded,” or “I took them out of the case and they were just sitting there in eighteen thousand pieces.”

Bear in mind that the researchers who came up with this theory also like to inhale helium on a regular basis.