Not quite in the clear

Last week, I found myself in a darkened back room with a huge, white plastic machine - something that appeared to have been dislodged from the Starship Enterprise - resting on the bridge of my nose. I was having an eye test. I had reached crisis point. I wear monthly contact lenses but they had evolved into "yearlies" - dirty, scratched and warped. My spectacles, too, were falling apart. I had, in my four years in the UAE, never quite made it past an optician's threshold, and things were undeniably, if not clearly, getting worse. The day I stood in the street and tried to hail a passing police car, I realised things had gone far enough. I had to get my eyes checked out. (The police didn't stop for me, by the way).

In my myopic haze, I seem to have landed in one of the country's less impressive eye establishments. As I wandered into the shop, the door was immediately flung open by a beaming young man in an ill-fitting white lab coat. "Come in, sir!" he shouted jovially. The game was afoot. Ten minutes later, following a lengthy speech extolling the store's preferred brand of contact lens, my optometrist was looking lost. The mighty technology had overpowered him and intimidated me. A few false starts later - "Please read the letters, sir." "There are no letters. I am looking at a photograph of a road" - the instruction manual came out. The young man breathed heavily as he pored over the pages, jabbing at buttons and switches with increasing agitation. In front of my weary eyes, a succession of images flashed past. Letter charts, more photographs of roads, a basket of kittens, blasts of green and red, more letters - they all whizzed back and forth as the man miserably tried to find something fun for me to look at.

Finally, he leant back and pointed forlornly to the yellowed letter chart hanging askew on the wall, from which I read, with impatient haste. The machine was switched off in disgrace, emitting a small, mournful whine as it powered down, much to our mutual relief. My eyes hadn't deteriorated, he concluded, hopefully. Nor did I need stronger lenses. I listened to another lecture about the unbelievable properties of proprietary contact lenses, this time with the aid of a small leaflet, showing a healthy young couple, apparently touring Italy on a small moped. Smitten, I paid up for a six-month supply and left the shop, satisfied. That is, until I put them in and spent half an hour trying to find my front door. It seems that, optimistically speaking, my clear vision of the future is some way off just yet.
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