Defective Eye Charts
In a move to cut costs, optometrists are using cheap eye charts made by illiterate children in sketchy print shops in third world countries. In my younger years the letters used to be crisp and sharp, all the way down to the last line. Not these cheap substitutes – the blur begins on about the third line and just gets worse as you proceed. No quality control whatsoever. It’s a disgrace, frankly. There oughta be a law.
Now, the perceptive reader may have registered some skepticism by this point, and is ready to respond, “Norm, are you sure the problem is the chart?”
And you’d be right. But I tell this story by way of illustration of the very human tendency to allocate blame to anything else, anyone else, or any other place, just not ourselves. My favourite techie was fond of explaining some of my technology issues by saying, “The problem appears to be somewhere between the chair and the keyboard.” And he was usually right, but I didn’t like to hear it. I’d much have preferred to blame the program or the machine.
Sure, there are gremlins and evil spirits aplenty out there, ready to upend our best plans and projects. Blame the gorbies, for sure. But more often than not most major failures and bung-ups can be traced back to the culprit in the mirror.
There’s much to be said for living in authenticity. Not only does it take a lot less energy than improvising “alternative facts”, but people think better of us and trust us more if we deal in straight goods.
That’s not to say that a little fantasy and frivolity aren’t good for us. They are, we could all use some laughs and some lightness.
But let’s admit when fictions are fictions.