Doc, don't change what ain't broken.

I don't think I can recommend my optometrist anymore.

I have always been mildly nearsighted. I wear glasses to drive, although technically I don't have to. The secret of my wearing glasses since my mid-30s is that, when I was young, I had phenomenally good vision, and what most people consider "normal" or 20/20 is, to me, quite a blurry world, and I've worn fairly pricely lenses that restore me to the 20/10 I had when I was 17.

I also have very mild presbyopia. That's the condition that happens as we age: the cornea hardens, the muscles weaken, and the result is that we can no longer focus on things close up, hence the whole idea of "reading glasses." While I have reading glasses, I've always found that a custom prescription feels better and, frankly, it's important enough to me that I be able to read comfortable for hours that I'm willing to spring the cash for prescription lenses there as well.

Last month I went to the optometrist and got my eyes measured. He wrote out a prescription, I went to the lens place and ordered new glasses. Two pairs: a progressive pair for work, with multiple reading distances (on the screen up top, in-hand on the bottom), and a progressive day-use pair (driving distances up top, in-hand reading on the bottom).

The work pair are fantastic. Light weight and well-focused, and wearing them is rather comfortable, although for laptop use they're still a little awkward.

The day-use pair were a complete fuckup. I'd ordered a pair with a bigger glass surface in order to increase my reading zone. Insead, when I put them on while the distance part worked well, the reading zone was unusable. My eyes were quivering trying to make them work. It hurt to wear them. The woman tried and tried to adjust them to find "a sweet spot," and I said I didn't want a sweet spot, the bottom zone on my old lenses was broad and effective. We eventually found that the lenses had been ground wrong, and the reading zone was not a full 8mm on the bottom, but only the bottom 2mm of the lens.

Okay, I get that. People make mistakes. I'm willing to accept that someone got the wrong information and applied to my order.

What's more perplexing to me is that the technician who did the grinding just accepted this weird order without question. "Only a 2mm reading zone? That's seems weird." I would think that it would take an extra confirmation, and maybe an override on the machine, in order to make that sort of thing work.

But then the kicker was, while I was looking through that tiny zone, I said, "My old glasses have a broader zone, too. I thought the whole point of buying a bigger glass area was to increase my reading zone."

"It looks like your doctor increased the strength of your reading prescription. That'll make the horizontal zone a little smaller."

That's when I flipped my lid. Because my doctor never checked my presbyopia. The tests were all distance related; I could still read just fine with my old lenses and my old prescription. I explicitly said I wanted it kept.

He went ahead and changed it anyway because, you know, old people's eyes get worse with time and patients sometimes don't know what's good for them.

Bugger. Anyway, the frames have been sent back to the grinder for new lenses, and I have get everything customized. Thankfully, I don't have to pay for the regrind, but what a paternalistic pain-in-the-ass this has been!

The more money I have, the less I understand rich people.

So, something weird happened to me last year. I realized I was rich.

My richness won't last; already, the investment-based income streams that got me to this place are drying up, the last bits of stock option awards that stretch back almost sixteen years. Almost all of the money that I made in that time has gone into savings and I still can't afford to retire, but I'm definitely much, much further along than most people. You know that whole "40% of American families would enter a death-spiral of debt and bankruptcy if they had a $500 financial shock" thing? Omaha and I could survive that. And a lot more. In the long-term, my income is going to go down, a lot, in the next three years, but last year? Last year I made bank.

To celebrate, this Christmas we all got new phones, top-of-the-line iPhones and Pixels. We spent a lot of money. And I barely noticed; it was a line item on a chart, a blip on our liquidity account. A big blip, true, but nothing that won't be recovered in a couple of months, provided Trump doesn't start a nuclear war or financial meltdown.

And that was it. We have a lovely house in a middling suburb that's almost too big for us now that one kid is in college; we have four-year-old car that was bought with insurance money after I was struck by a drunk driver, so the purchase of both cars stretches back almost nine years now.

I mention this because, the more I hang out with rich people the less I understand them. Whenever I read about a company that made millions in shareholder profits but refuses to raise the wages of its workers, I get unbelievably angry. It's just a line item. It's meaningless. Nobody will get hurt by it. Not a single shareholder will have to pull in his or her belt a notch to survive making sure hourly wage workers have enough to eat, and medicine to survive. Stories like "Wall Street punishes Alaska Airlines for increasing pilots' pay are insane. I make more than the highest-paid co-pilots in the US! That doesn't make any sense; lives aren't on the line if I screw up, I'm not second-in-charge of a multi-million dollar piece of machinery. I'm just a guy with some well-trained math skills. If my boss keels over in an emergency, it's not my job to get 300 people down to the ground safely.

I just... I just don't get rich people. I mean, I get some of it. At some point, if you're in charge of a lot of information streams, having a personal assistant and being able to pay them is important. Some people are the lynchpins of industry or society; I can understand them having a 10× or even 20× income stream to pay for their support mechanisms, like a personal assistant or someone else to drive and launder. And I don't begrudge buying nice things; I like nice things, too. But 270× is insane. And fighting to maintain that 270× by screwing your workers out of a living wage and fighting to reduce taxes and eliminate public health services, the very services that keep your underpaid support team from coughing up the Black Plague in your limousine, is madness.

It's tar-and-feather, torches-and-pitchforks territory. And I worry we're getting there very quickly.