Optician Online - The Big Optometry Blog

A recent post linking comedy and optics has really got people going. Have a look at this clip. Who says optics isn't funny

Anyone attending Independents Day last week will have seen optometrist and staff development consultant Sarah Morgan in full voice.
Here is a short clip of her at the Nivea funny women awards. If anyone has the full version from ID '08 put it on You Tube and I'll create a link.
There was more than a hint of theatricality at ID 08. Fellow presenter Wendy Sethi also broke out into song. Unfortunately she wasn't on You Tube so I can't share that with you. Her performance was pretty steamy I can tell you and very popular with some male sections of the audience.

Optometrists are generally perceived to have received poorer treatment than doctors and dentists over their NHS contracts, but government contracts are not the only area in which optics receives a worse deal in comparison to other health services.

Optics in the arts is another area which could lead practitioners to feel aggrieved over the indifference shown to their profession by filmmakers and musicians. Television doctors are extremely common with some prominent examples being Dr Karl Kennedy in Neighbours, Star Trek's Dr Leonard 'Bones' McCoy and Dick Van Dyke's Dr Mark Sloan from Diagnosis Murder. Doctors in film are similar common with portrayals of the profession in such classics as Frankenstein and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. Set in the Vietnam war, M*A*S*H's Hawkeye and Hot Lips bought screen fame to physicians.

Even dentistry is reasonably represented on screen, with the character of Jennifer Aniston's husband being a dentist in the television series Friends, while who can forget Lawrence Olivier's chilling portrayal of a Nazi dentist in Marathon Man? A similarly memorable performance of a German dentist came from Peter Sellers as Inspector Clouseau in The Pink Panther Strikes. In fact a search on the Internet Movie Database (IMDB) for dentist brings up 39 films with the term dentist actually in the title, including six films simply titled The Dentist, 2006's Vampire Dentist as well as The Avenging Dentist and The Kaiser's New Dentist. However the Swedish Dentist does not sound like mainstream cinema.

An IMDB search for optician or optometrist does not yield any results at all and if anybody can remember an optical professional in film or television please add a comment.

A lyric search for optician or optometrist show that the profession has not been referenced by any musicians of greater note than Ulster punk band, Stiff Little Fingers who sang: 'I want to be dead the optician said 20 20 but you stumbled round like you were blind.'

So what to you make of this imbalance? While the drama of a casualty ward might naturally inspire writers, horror films aside surely optometry deserves as much screen devotion as dentistry?

This Friday's Optician will carry a story on the latest Mintel report. Among its suggestions is that glasses may become part of a company uniform.
I began to think about what brands different jobs could adopt.

Zoo keepers Animal
managers Boss
Petrol pump attendents Diesel
Landlords Lulu Guiness

I was going to have a stab at Playboy but decided against

I recently had to do some research to create an optical quiz. During the process I came across a range of interesting facts. It never ceases to amaze me what opticians through the years have got up to and clearly this has always been the case. One such maverick was Hatschek bela .
He was an optician and the first man in Hungary to have a car. Apparently Arch Duke Ferdinand mistook the noise of his vehicle as an assassination attempt during a visit to the city. If only he had always been so alert.

Didn't make it to the Optician Awards? Too busy? Relive the experience from the comfort of your own desk

The profession is constantly under threat from all sides but it appears there is a new interloper. The following ad, and many like it, appear on a rival website. Is there something we should know?

Full/Part-time Optometrists Required
Location: Scotland
Sector: Optometrist
Employer: Elizabeth Street Veterinary Clinic
More details

Rock'n'roll legend Lou Reed has been forced to ditch his ever-present sunglasses in favour of regular specs after repeatedly tripping up on stage.

Shades have played a key role in Reed's iconic look, from his inception as the Velvet Underground's frontman and through his long and varied solo career.

But is the idea of glasses being uncool outdated? A recent news story suggested cries of "Hey four-eyes!" have ceased to ring around playgrounds as children with glasses are no longer bullied for their ocular deficiency. So is there a pair of frames out there that could actually enhance Reed's image?

The marine biology community has been awash with excitement this week as some lucky representatives of it took apart a colossal squid. Caught last year in the Ross Sea off Antarctica, the specimen is only the 10th of its kind unfortunate enough to fall into the hands of scalpel-wielding scientists. The creature’s eyes have been widely acclaimed as the largest to be found in nature – an impressive 30cm in diameter. Sizable as they are, Optician’s Clinical Editor assures me the squid has relatively poor vision due to their unsophisticated nature. A case of size not being everything…

Readers of Optician will no doubt appreciate the careful blend of features published each issue; a delicate balance of the clinical and the topical, the far-reaching and the fashionable. Such perfection does not come easily and the consistently high standard achieved over the past year or two can be credited to one woman: Shannon McKenzie.

Unfortunately for you, the reader, Shannon has returned to the sunny land down-under, where she is no doubt throwing another shrimp on the barbie, drinking Fosters, wrestling crocs and participating in untold other activities that we insist on stereotyping our antipodeans cousins with. So you are now stuck with me, Mike Hale, the new Features Editor.

Seriously though, I would like to wish Shannon well with her continuing career as a journalist and thank her for leaving the features list packed with interesting and informative pieces for the coming months. I’ll be doing my very best to continue her good work.

Over the next couple of months I’ll be blogging on my thoughts and first impressions of the optical industry, hopefully with the sort of insight exclusive to the naïve and innocent.

At the awards last week I was impressed by the glamorous representatives of the trade (confounding mine and host Ardal O'Hanlon’s preconceptions) and was pleased many of the people I spoke to expressed a genuine affection for my new publication.

If any one has any thoughts or suggestions on the features in the magazine please get in touch via mike.hale@rbi.co.uk and anyone who still misses Shannon may well get the chance to move to Australia in the near future with Specsaver’s planned expansion - more on that in the magazine soon.