Peepers

I've been wearing glasses since the 4th grade. It's hard to remember because glasses are kind of cool now. Tina Fey looks sassy in hers and it makes us all feel better about them. Sadly, as a kid they weren't quite so cool. To be fair, it wasn't just the glasses...keep in mind that even as a kid, I have always been on the rounder side of round. Oh yeah, and I had braces to fix my bucked teeth and overbite. (I'm not exaggerating on the teeth. My sisters used to call me "Pronger", because my teeth looked like the pronged end of a hammer.) In short, I was the pudgy kid with glasses and bad teeth. It was an awkward phase...a really awkward phase.

I'm a lot less awkward now and my teeth are pretty, but I still have to wear glasses or contacts to function. My new fancy eye doctor has two different offices. One for glasses and medical stuff and the other just for contacts. It's neat and fancy, but it requires two different appointments in two different locations. The first appointment is where this story takes place.

The office is actually in the hospital. It's a little unnerving to walk into a simple routine appointment and watch people rolling around with IV's with their heinies hanging out of their paper gowns. Is that what happens to people who get the letters wrong on the eye chart quiz?...yikes...


I get up to the office and the check-in process is practically painless and relatively simple. I sat for a few minutes reading an old People magazine (did you hear that Brad and Angelina had twins?!) when a nice normal looking nurse calls me back. We chat for a few minutes, she looks in my eye with a big microscope, and then she puts some drops in my eyes and tells me to hang out in the waiting room and that she'll come back to get me in 20ish minutes. Piece of cake...except that it's me. And nothing is that simple.


A few minutes go by, my eyes are dilating and things are starting to get fuzzy and kind of burny. I'm feeling my way down the hall towards the ladies' room when the nurse calls my name and catches up to me in the hall.

She says, "What's your date of birth?"

I give it to her and she says, "Oh. See, we have the wrong date of birth here. I knew that looked wrong."

I squint at the paper where she's pointing with her pen. "7/1/08?"

Now, I'm not surprised that it's wrong. Data entry mistakes happen all the time. I'm more concerned that she, even for a split second, thought that she had to confirm that the date she had was wrong. That I might actually somehow be 17 months old.

"You'll have to call Registration to get that fixed. We have a special phone just for that."

She leads me to a corner of the waiting room that appears to be sectioned off for just such telephone calls. It's got a partition and a brightly colored piece of paper taped to the wall with the phone number to Registration. It looks kind of like the phone Commissioner Gordon uses to call Batman. This leads me to believe that this happens alot.

I speak to a perfectly nice woman who is completely flabbergasted by this error. She "CANNOT BELIEVE IT!" It is literally impossible for her to take my word for it.

She says, "I mean if this was off by a few days or so, I would be glad to make this change. But this is off by a lot and I just can't make a change like that without some sort of proof"

Up until this point, I've been a pretty good sport about the situation, but this is too much for me to resist. "You want some sort of proof that I wasn't born last July?"

"Yeah, I'll need SOMEthing to prove it."

"You mean the fact that I'm able to dial the phone and speak in complete sentences isn't sufficient evidence that I'm not one and one half years old?"

"No ma'am."

... ..."Umm...ok. What might work for you?"

"You could fax me a copy of your driver's license."

They haven't called back to ask for my birth certificate or anything, so I guess I'm in the clear.