The eye doctors at Clear View Optometry are friendly, competent, and courteous; the front office staff is snippy, incompetent, and defensive: if your glasses turn out wrong, like mine did (twice!), they will blame YOU, even though they are in charge of every step of the process. My advice? Go somewhere else.
I should have known there was a problem when the person who helped me select my glasses used a Sharpie to measure my pupillary distance. That's right, a Sharpie. I chose a pair of frames I liked, and put them on. She asked me to look at her, then used a Sharpie to mark a spot on each lens. The result was a tiny squiggly line in the middle of each lens. Mind you, she didn't use a pupillometer (the handheld device you look into that accurately measures the distance between your pupils) like they do at every other optometry shop I've been to. Pupillary distance, I later learned, is critical to producing correct lenses, especially for certain types of lens material, or certain kinds of prescriptions. But here, at Clear View, the office staff determined my pupillary distance my measuring the distance between two scribbles.
I was there to order bifocals, so the next step was to determine the placement of the bifocal lens (the half-moon shaped insert in the lower part of the lens). The proper way to do this, I later learned, is to use your current eye glasses as a guide and measure the distance from the bottom edge of the frame to the top edge of the bifocal, then transfer that measurement to the new frame and the new lenses. Makes sense.
At Clear View they use scotch tape instead of a ruler. They ask, "Where do you want your bifocal lens placed?" You shake your head and say, "At the bottom?" Then they'll put a piece of scotch tape on the lens. "How's that?" they ask. You move your head around and notice that you can see through the top half of the lens only; the bottom half is completely blurred because... there's a piece of SCOTCH TAPE on the lens. "Is it too high?" they ask. "I guess," you'll say. They take off your glasses, peel off the tape, move it down, and ask "Is that better?" You can now see better through the lens -- the blurry spot has moved down. "Yeah, I guess so," you say. "Great!" they say, then whisk off your new glasses for processing.
Two weeks later, when you pick up your new eye glasses, the bifocal will be misplaced. You'll have to tip your head back unnaturally whenever you want to use your glasses to read. The incorrect pupillary distance means the things you want to see will never quite be in focus.
When you tell the office person that something's not right, all the pretense, all their smiles and fakey politeness instantly evaporates. "Hm," they'll say. "Well." Then they'll make a display of looking at your chart, then at your new $350 glasses, then back at your chart. "I don't understand it," they'll say. "They should be perfect." This is when they smile at you and hand you back the glasses. "Try them again." This is more a directive than a request. You put the glasses back on. You now realize the lenses are much worse than you first realized. These glasses are wrong. "Is that better now?" they ask, the voice rising with growing impatience. "Uh.... No. Something's wrong." Now you get The Look. The Look says, "I am so SICK of these idiotic patients who WASTE my time." They snatch the glasses off your face and stomp up to the reception desk where they talk in hushed tones to the Office Manager, both of them shooting you disapproving glances.
Now comes the Office Manager. Slowly. Step. By. Step. Every footfall is a warning to think about the problem you are causing to the entire front office staff -- all of them now looking at you with disdain and disapproval. You are now THE COMPLAINER. This will probably be the first time you notice that they are all dressed like the models in the posters put up around the shop, the ones with the models that look too beautiful, too perfect to need eyeglasses. The posters that make you feel like an outsider.
If you've forgotten your high school days, the front office staff at Clear View will remind you instantly of that circle of mean kids who dressed well on daddy's dime and looked down their noses at everybody else.
After a few minutes, the Office Manager finally slumps into the chair across from you. She hands you your new $350 glasses without speaking to you. You put the glasses on. And yes, believe it or not, she gets out the Sharpie and the scotch tape and goes through whole routine again. And when the glasses come back two weeks later, they're still wrong.
I think you can trust the eye doctors here to get a correct prescription, but get your glasses somewhere else. The office staff is the WORST: they'll resent you for making them do their job, then take it out on you by making sure your glasses come out wrong. read more
