Viewpoint: Fields of dreams

When I first started in optics, I spent all day every day in front of a visual fields screener. Repeating the same instructions, and hearing the same clicks and beeps was frustrating beyond measure at the time, but thanks to Nigel, the locum optometrist teaching and testing me about perimetry, I started to appreciate how important this bane of my working life was. 

Fast forward more years than I’d like to count, and nowadays my frustrations have shifted to thoughts such as “I wonder how much I’ll be charged for this next engineer visit on this less than five year old machine which is already one of the most expensive pieces of equipment we own,” or “why is this thing such a money pit when the twenty plus year old Henson in the other room still works perfectly?” But I still do love an interesting field plot.