log (2008/01/04 to 2008/01/10)

Lenscrafters! Glasses in an Hour!

The glasses that you actually want in a week!

Or two!

Or three at the most! At least we really try hard --

Well, no we don't. We care about the quantity of customer experience, not the quality. Given what they pay us, what do you expect? But anyway!

Glasses in an Hour!

So one of the little daughter's Solstice-time presents was a pair of glasses. She wears contacts now, and feels like she doesn't really need glasses, but she thought it'd be fun to get some fancy ones for now and then.

So we went to Lenscrafters in The Mall, because it's convenient, despite them having messed up a few times in the past. She and M had fun trying on different frames and stuff, and eventually she found some that she liked, and we sat down with the nice Lenscrafter person who typed things into her computer terminal for a long time and eventually smilingly said that it would cost hundreds of dollars, and because of mumble mumble they wouldn't be able to have them for a week.

Well, that was sort of too bad because it meant that they wouldn't be under the tree on Christmas, but what can you do. So we put a little promissory note under the tree.

A week later we called Lenscrafters and they said that oh yeah the lenses had come in, but they were wrong and they had to re-order them and they'd be ready in another week.

We called them back in another week, and they said that oh yeah the new ones had come in, but they were wrong again, and we could take them anyway if we wanted?

We said that um, no, we didn't really want the wrong glasses, could we get the right ones maybe? And they said that yes they'd be ready in a week and they will call us.

Which fits in very nicely with the news stories the other month (which I can't find on the web right now) where they had Lenscrafters and some of the other instant-glasses places make up some glasses, and then they showed them to some real optometrists, who said omg wtf lol these are like completely wrong. It also fits in with my experience back in 2001, where even Lenscrafters' own Real Optometrist said that the glasses that two counter-people had assured me were Just Fine were in fact the wrong prescription.

There's some interesting psychological insight to be gained here, I think, about overdiscounting of the future, about underestimating the likelihood of failures of various kinds, about believing things that we ought to know are false, and so on. If anyone would like to write that insight down and send it in, please do. *8)

News Flash: Second Life Ponzi scheme turns out to be Ponzi scheme! Who would have guessed?

The Lindens think that this sort of thing is serious enough (or, I suspect, they think that some government might think that this is serious enough) that they've banned claiming to pay interest within SL, unless you're licensed to do so by some real-world "governing regulatory authority". As one of the comments points out, this means that all the Ponzis and demi-Ponzis that would have crashed over the next few weeks or months or years will crash right now instead, do to sudden extreme runs.

Interesting times!

Snarky Idea o' the Day: I propose that we save lots of public money and increase the effectiveness of the US election process, by having all these Evangelicals who are such an important voting block convey their votes directly to God who can then ensure that they are correctly entered into the vote-tallying process efficiently and at low cost, rather than using the more expensive and error-prone human voting mechanisms.

I think this would greatly improve the outcome of our elections. *8)

Theme Park Theme:

Mellow Rasta Dudes of the Caribbean
It's a mean ugly world after all
Phillis Diller Land

Indeed!