Pickles & Dimes

We finally got around to showing Jason’s parents our bungee jumping video from this summer. His Dad said he could put some music to it if we wanted, and before the sentence was completely out of his mouth, I blurted: “Jump. By Van Halen.” And Jason was like, “Aw, man. That’s a good one.”

He had to settle for “Learning to Fly” by Tom Petty.

While grocery shopping last night at Cub (Home of the “I’ll Leave my Cart in the Middle of the Aisle and You Can’t Stop Me” syndrome), Jason and I noticed that Heinz ketchup has some limited-edition bottles, where “celebrities” such as Terry Bradshaw, William Shatner and Mia Hamm come up with pithy taglines. Here are their contributions:

Bradshaw: “Served at the Immaculate Reception”
Shatner: “Fixes Burgers at Warp Speed”
Hamm: “Worthy of Gold”

But the best one had to be from Lindsay Lohan: “Burger-licious”

After convulsing with laughter for 5 minutes, we decided Lindsay could’ve done better.

Maybe something like: “Oh, my God! This stuff’s, like, red and stuff!”

For what it’s worth, my contribution would be this: “I put ketchup on ketchup.”

So last night, driving home from work, as I’m zipping along the freeway doing 70-75 mph (or 60 mph for all you cops out there), I felt my seat shift. Not just a little, weight displacement shift. A shift that felt like someone was pushing against my seat. So me, being the most paranoid person in the world, expected someone to jump up and put a gun to my head or stab me through the seat. I played it cool and talked myself out of craning my head to look in the backseat while speeding along the road next to a guardrail overlooking a 200-foot drop. I refrained from looking until I got home. When I looked into the back seat, I saw a bloody hook.

OK, I lied. It wasn’t bloody. Just rusty.

Dear Bausch & Lomb,

I am writing to you concerning your product, the SofLens®. A year ago, my optometrist casually changed my prescription to this brand, and myself, not being the overly observant type, merely noticed a difference in the box packaging and thought, “Huh.”

However, it did not take even this non-astute person long to realize that there is a serious flaw in the design of your product. When one removes the contact from one’s cornea, it immediately welds itself into a tiny, mangled ball. A ball that can be likened to a wad of congealed chewing gum – not bubble gum, but the nasty Wrigley® stuff that sticks to you when attempting to frantically free your fingers from it.

So what you end up with is no longer a mild-mannered, blue-tinted concave-shaped contact, but rather, a crumpled mass of extremely fragile material. To attempt to relinquish the death-grip the contact has on itself, one has to use their fingernails in a feeble attempt to re-open the contact. As you may or may not guess, this results in a beautifully jagged tear straight down the middle of the product. I can solely attribute my 5:1 ratio for contact usage per eye (left vs. right) in this manner. Why this product defect affects only the left contact, I cannot say.

Your Web site touts the following false statements benefits:
* Exceptional vision
* All day comfort
* Easy handling
* Easy adaption

While I disagree with all four selling points, the one I take the most exception to is the “easy handling” statement. If by “easy handling” you mean having to pry the contact apart as if it is an alien organism hellbent on suctioning itself into a wad and sucking my retina out of my eyeball, then yes, that statement is correct. If you mean “easy handling” in the fact that one has longer than .008 seconds to place the contact into a proper saline-filled receptacle before it glues itself shut, then sadly, your assertion is grossly misleading.

I hope your company will spend a few more R&D dollars in the future to remedy this defect. As for myself, I will be saving my money to get the LASIK® procedure.