I finally decided to go get my drivers’ license. I’ve had a permit several times before, but I never managed to go on to get a license. I go stand in line…fill out forms…and then comes the eye test.
I read the lines I am supposed to read. Then I am asked to read it with only my left eye. No problem. Then I am asked to read it with only my right eye. That, my friend, is something I cannot do. My right eye is not so good. My right eye is pretty damn bad. It doesn’t really bother me. My vision with both eyes is very good, and I never really need to see with only my right eye. Beyond that, I have perfect periphial vision. My right eye is simply less than accute.
The guy giving me the test scowls, “Why” he askes, “Can’t you do that?”
I tell him my right eye is not so accute.
“Can’t you get newer contacts?!?!” he askes incredulously.
I explain that I would not be walking around half blind in one eye if I had any other choice. I know all to well my contacts are new…I just spent two hundred dollars on them.
He makes me read another chart with just my right eye. This time I can make out the beginning and the end of it.
He scowls at me and says “We don’t need the beginning and the end! We need the middle!” as he writes big failure marks on my forms. I’m almost crying at this point, imagining that an untroubleing minor disability (that had never kept me from getting a permit before) might keep me from driving. All my dreams of filmmaking (I am a film major) did a big flop. You can’t take heavy film equiptment on the bus. For a moment a long bleak future of begging rides of friends and working at walking-distance McDonalds flashed through my head.
He continued to scowl, and look at me as if I was a mutant one-eyed freak. He rudely grabbed a form and told me to get my eye doctor to fill it out. He never told me that the form was merely a varification that my eyes would not get worse. He did not tell me that monocular vision is not grounds for denial of a license. He presented it to me as a last ditch effort, as if the eye doctor (who I can ill afford to pay) might decide that it is alright for me to drive.
I did some research on my own, and I ought to be alright.
Nevertheless, I spent this morning thinking that a minor problem on my part might doom me to a future of unemployment, unhappiness and general badness.
Grrrr
