Misplaced optimism in lost and found
22nd September, 2007
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The woman nodded knowingly as I related my tale of tears. I think I'd lost them in the taxi, I told her, but wasn't quite sure.
"When?" she asked.
The reason I hadn't been to the cab company's office to inquire before now was that for the first two weeks after it happened I was in a state of denial. Then came the rage, which manifested itself as a desire to bang my head against solid objects until blood flowed freely or I lost consciousness.
"They're quite expensive, aren't they?" said the woman, accustomed to the daily tide of pathetic humanity that lapped against her desk.
She reappeared a few moments later with a large cardboard box and repeated this exercise until there were three large cardboard boxes lined up on a bench in front of me, each containing several hundred pairs of glasses. "Have a look," she said. I'd had them all of three weeks before losing them, a wonderfully stylish pair of reading glasses. They were in my pocket, and then I got into the cab and when I got home they weren't there. I rose early the next morning and searched the footpath outside and the road and gutters, eyes downcast like a racecourse punter who's just thrown away a winning ticket and harbours the faint and dying hope that he will find it among the thousands discarded on the ground. This was the fourth expensive pair I'd lost. Add lost sunglasses to the equation and we're talking double figures. My annual eyewear bill was running into the thousands. At this rate I'd have to get a second job just to keep myself in glasses. Maybe I should get a weekend job in an optometrist's store and get the employee's discount. I then decided, somewhat irrationally, that it was all the fault of my optometrist for selling me glasses that were too easily lost. I vowed never to set foot in her premises again, resolutely refusing to confront the possibility that I might be an absent-minded moron with the concentration powers of a goldfish who should not be allowed out on his own. There were a number of flaws in this optometry ban, not the least of which was my inability to read newspapers or computer screens without glasses, something of a handicap in my line of work. So I assumed my fallback position, the $20 chemist shop specials. "These are fine," I assured myself, squinting into the mirror. Then again, I thought, as I felt my eyeballs being sucked out of my skull by some invisible magnetic field, maybe they're a bit strong. But they'd have to do. Standing before three brown cardboard boxes at the cab company, some of the guilt I'd felt for months began to dissolve. I'm not alone, I thought, blindly digging into the contents of one of the boxes. There were big glasses and small, horn-rimmed and gold-rimmed, dainty feminine spectacles and large professional male models along with cases of every kind, hundreds and hundreds of glasses intermingled with an equally impressive array of sunglasses. I trawled through all three boxes, muttered my thanks and slunk out the door a defeated man. The boxes contained glasses belonging to every careless, bubble-brained, absent-minded idiot in Brisbane except me, though with my own glasses it was hard to tell for sure. I stuck with the $20 chemist's shop glasses until the headaches from the resultant eye strain became too much, forcing me to lift my black ban on the optometrist who, unaware that I had ever imposed it, smiled as I entered her store.
"Give me the cheapest pair of glasses in the shop," I said as I entered.
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