New Glasses

Yesterday I got my new glasses. There is a bit story behind them.

My current job is primarily working with young men who have autism and other developmental disabilities. Slightly more than occasionally they can be aggressive, even violent. Since I started 3 years ago there was one student who always went for my glasses when he got pissed off. I was usually able to predict it and take them off, or just block him, or something. Even so he managed to knock my glasses off several times a month, and actually break them a few times a year. He moved on to a group home about 9 months ago. Since then, my glasses have been knocked off once. And never broken.

So I decided to get new glasses. In recent years I went with the plastic frames. Metal frames have small arms holding the nose pads in position. Those arms would frequently be bent any time the glasses were hit, and knocked off my head. Since that happened a few times a week in some weeks, even a few times a day on bad days, I decided to go with plastic frames. The nose pad of plastic frames are molded right into the frame. Nothing to bend. And nothing to adjust as well.

Finding plastic frames is in was more difficult because they need to fit your nose exactly right. Unfortunately, trying them on in the store isn't quite good enough, to be sure they do fit right. The acetate used to make nearly all plastic frames is made to be bendable when heated up, so they can be adjusted to fit better. That malleability when heated is also a draw back. The warmer you heat them the softer they get, but they are never quite solid. Even the warmth of a persons face when combined with a little tension on the arms will cause the arms to widen and loose that tension. That's a problem if you're relying on a little tension squeezing your head, to keep them in place. The bridge of the nose when warmed throughly for several hours, can be widened simply by gravity.

Both of those problems plagued all three plastic framed glasses I tried in the last few years. None of them could be made to fit right. Now that my glasses are staying on my head I decided to go back to the metal frames.

What do you think?