Optician Online - The Big Optometry Blog

Apposite hardly starts to describe the timing of the start of this Blog.
I make that point because after many months of sweat and a few tears, Optician has a new design. This spanking new-looking issue is written, laid out and poised to hit the streets this Friday. Trust me it looks great!
But back to the blog. As part of a world class publishing company I have been badgered for some time to start a blog. It's not that I wasn't keen to write a web log, more a question of whether anyone would be interested in reading it and what exactly its content should be.

No sooner was my first post, well posted, than a question appeared. Not the usual, "how many CET points have I got", type of question.
The enquirer wanted to know who supplied the sunglasses for the lastest Bollywood movie smash, Don. A picture is posted below. Any answers.

It was a red letter day in the Optician office today. After weeks of hard work the redesign issue hit the streets. To mark the occasion Optician took over the lobby of the publishing business of which we are part.
To celebrate the launch we offered our fellow workers the opportunity to win £1,000 worth of Sunglass Hut vouchers. Most of the magazines in the building have titles like Chemical News and Computer weekly so our sunglass round up went down well. Optician took over the whole of the lobby to celebrate the launch.

Of course the editor, that's me, had to make the ultimate sacrifice and wear an Optician-logoed shirt while handing out the launch issue.
With that job completed in fine magazine style it was off down the pub.

With the short Oakley Transitions Ironman Team sojourn in Monaco over its is back to the usual trials and tribulations of the Optician office. CET has been vexing everyone of late as the strange transition from old style to new takes place. It.........

For the last couple of years optical life has been dominated by CET and, as we are now all European, we could say: plus ca change.
Optician's journal assistant Kay has always been in the front line when it comes to CET calls to the office but in recent days the phone has been ringing off the hook so we have all been takiong calls.

I has a strange email from a readers last Friday morning.
The email was to inform me that the reader had a strange issue of Optician.

Have received my copy today which starts on page 11 then goes to page 18 then back to page 11 then goes up to page 42 then back to page 36 and finishes on page 51 !!! Comments please

CET is frequently mentioned on this blog and not without cause.

The problems caused by CET are almost exclusively computer problems and rarely have anything to do with a professional's ability to care for patients or understand optometry.

Everybody seems very interested in the judging of the Optician Awards.

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery but imagine our surprise when the latest copy of AOP's mag appeared in the Optician office.

Way back in May Optician's own Emma White ( pictured) used Dame Mary as the covergirl on her supplement Women in Optics a little over a month later and hey presto. Where will it all end?

I had the pleasure yesterday of hosting another Optician round table discussion.

(The picture is actually from our smoking debate)

Some of you lucky people have already seen this week's pink edition of Optician. The colour change is in recognition of Breast Cancer awreness month and CooperVision.

The more eagle-eyed among you may have noticed a remarkable similarity between the recent articles on CooperVision that appeared in OT and Vision Now and, perish the thought, Optician. The picture below is by way of proof that I, Chris Bennett on August 15th in the year of our Lord 2007 did hereby visit the afore mentioned company and did conduct the afore mentioned interview. That's my notebook in the picture, shorthand and all.

Some people will do anything to get into Optician. In this instance I will make an exception. This is Fiona Bosher, Optician's very own Ironwoman relaxing before ( or after) taking part in the world championships in Clearwater, Florida.
She is now officially the 60th fastest woman in the world in her age group. Except for when it's her round.

A wide range of things happen across my desk and I have to say these are of variable quality. Every so often though a little gem appears, a gem that encompasses, in a few short words, a trend that is driving us all mad. One such piece of correspondence, sent in by a leading member of the optical industry, was the cutting below from a journal called Photonics Spectra.

If this is a familiar scene to anyone out there at the moment you have my deepest sympathies. Not only do you have to appraise all of the your staff but if a report on the the BBC website is to be believed staff actually resent being appraised and think their bosses are being dishonest.
Dishonest in an appraisal perish the thought!

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7126971.stm

When you see a picture like this in the newspaper you know there is a joke in there somewhere . I spotted this picture a while back and although I knew there was something in there it just didn't gel in my mind.
I am grateful of the contribution, it is so obvious now.
I should imagine there are many Northern Rock shareholders wishing for the same thing.

This month's Bizarre magazine has once again raised the prickly subject of corneal tattooing. Unfortunately the web security in the Optician office doesn't allow us to look at Bizarre's website but the New York Post also had a feature on the procedure.

This is some of the entries to this year Optician Awards.
It may look like another pile of papers to you but is also represents a lot of work on the part of our readers and a lot of judging to get through.
One of the big changes to the awards has been making the initial entries easier by housing them online and just asking for a statement.
Look out for those shortlists!

This is some of the entries to this year Optician Awards.
It may look like another pile of papers to you but is also represents a lot of work on the part of our readers and a lot of judging to get through.
One of the big changes to the awards has been making the initial entries easier by housing them online and just asking for a statement.
Look out for those shortlists!

Optometry is where it is at. Not 'arf.
Justin Timberlake's latest single, available from all good record shops, has a strong glaucoma prevention message. Check it out pop pickers.

A new piece of silverware ( metaphorically speaking) has been added to the Optician cabinet.
Publishing a magazine can be a thankless task. You break your back delivering news, writing features and providing all those bits of information that make life bearable for your readers. The only feedback you get is when the website has broken down.

But what is this? Optician has won an award. An award from the Thomas Tallis School in Lewisham.
A certificate in recognition of Optician for its support in supporting the school's work experience programme.
The accolade arises from Optician's recent agreement to take on a work experience placement from the school for a week. A year ten girl spent a week with the team finding out what it was like to be a journalist.

We must have been good to get a certificate. I feel like the employee of the month. It takes so little to make folk happy.

Our clincial editor is often mistaken for Francis Rossi of status Quo but he has decided to expand his repetoire of looky-likees.

His lastest attemp is to..........

With just minutes before 500 plus Optician Awards guests flood into the Ballroom of the Hilton Hotel Park Lane this is the scene.
The night was a fantastic success which you can read all about online or in next week's Optician. I would like to thank everyone who entered the Awards. When the DVD arrives I'll post it up on You Tube for those who couldn't make the ceremony.

Surgeons at Moorfields eye hospital have successfully implanted devices into the eyes of blind patients suffering from the disease the disease retinitis pigmentosa. Click here for full story.

The devices known as Argus II receive a wireless signal transmitted from a camera on a pair of glasses. It is not known whether the devices - implanted into the eyes of two men in their fifties – will help the patients to see better, but they were both recovering well from their operations.

Although the trials continue into bionic eyes are very good news for sufferers of retinitis pigmentosa, news that they are being carried out may come as a disappointment to the scores of computer gamers hungrily scouring the internet in hope of more developments about a very different ‘bionic’ eye. However there is in actual fact nothing bionic about the contact lenses imprinted with circuit boards they hope will revolutionise their computer gaming experience in the non-foreseeable future.

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

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?

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

Seth Belson of Essex thought the following link might prove interesting/amusing to Optician readers.
As someone who works with words I take no pleasure in typographical errors.
There are the obvious effects/affects, in optics the missing first 'h' in ophthalmology etc. Hong Kong is always worth a second look and we alsomost had a bit of pubic scrutiny in Optician last week.
This has to be one of the classics though.

Forgive me if this entry is a bit brief but I have already created it once and it disappeared into cyberspace so I'm not best pleased.

Anyway with all this Olympic hysteria going on and British people winning medals willy nilly it seems opticians are joining in.
Since the Optician Ironman foray the team members ( pictured) don't seem to be able to stop.

Since the original event there have been fell races, triathlons, dragon boat racing and all sorts of things.
To round the season off I have asked some of the South East based members of the team to join me in the Crawley Late Summer Triathlon. This will please VAO's. Jeremy Jalie. Crawley is local to him so he won't have to do all of the travelling supporting the team has so far involved. with his help the team raised £7,500 for VAO. If you haven't donated you can here . If you are in the Crawley area come along to K2 on September 21st and cheer us on.