Somebody made it, why can't you fix it?

Today got off to a rotten start. I sat down at my desk to work on fixing this rather strange problem at work and before I even got around to getting my first coffee I hear this little "plink" and my glasses fell off my face. Fuck. O.K. this has happened before. There is a little screw in the right arm that likes to come loose. Fine. Having had glasses since I was three I've preformed more than a few emergency repairs and know a few tricks. So into my desk drawer I go for a pen with a metal clip I can break off and use for a screw-driver. Out comes the tiny screw that holds the spring assembly in place and I am mortified to see that the screw from the spring assembly that attaches to the hinge has not simply come loose, but has snapped. Crap.

Ordinarily at this point I would switch to my spare set and go shopping for a replacement on Saturday. Problem is these are my spares because my other set broke very similarly last year and I couldn't afford to replace them due to $6/lb organic asparagus. They had been "fixed" with mis-matched arms and still had my old prescription in them. Not having a choice at this point I went home and retrieved them. For those of you reading this that don't wear glasses it should be pointed out that switching prescriptions, particularly back to an old one that isn't quite strong enough, is a recipe for a killer headache.

Come noon I take a rare "lunch" break and head over to Granville Optical for a repair. This is where is really gets bad. The guy says, without so much as looking at the problem, "They're hooped. You'll need a new arm." I explained to him that no, these ones come apart and all I need is a new screw and hinge. I explained how to take them apart so he could see for himself. He tried. Next thing I am in the back room with him showing him how to do it. He explains that he can't order just the screw. Fine. Get an arm with a similar mechanism and swap out the screw. I'll pay for the whole arm, it's a lot cheaper than replacing glasses (with my prescription "cheap" glasses are about $400, just an arm runs about $20). He says he'll look through their parts drawer and see what he can do. I am optimistic.

After work I go back and the "options" he has for me is a mismatched arm or completely replacing the glasses. Neither one is an option. My unexpected root-canal and the two shit-head clients that have not paid have left my plans for New York in June in serious jeopardy already, a new pair of glasses now would mean waiting for Christmas to take my vacation and there is no fucking way I going to walk around anywhere with mismatched arms on my glasses. I thank him for his "effort" and take my glasses as-is.

Now I am depressed. I'm afraid that I'm fucked for June because of a 8 mm long screw. By the time I'm passing the art gallery depression has turned into snarling anger. Are people so incapable of fixing anything anymore? All I needed was a screw and to have the broken bit removed from the hinge. Somewhere someone makes these screws. A tiny metal tube with threads. Not magic. Somebody made it, why can't you fix it?

When I got home I rummaged through my collection of parts. The "broken" arm from the spares I was wearing had a similar mechanism, albeit a sealed one. I tore the casing open and extracted the screw I needed. I didn't have a drill bit small enough to drill out the broken piece of screw from the hinge, but I did have a similar hinge which was only slightly too large. A few moments with a metal file resolved that. It was fiddly work but in about an hour I had replaced the necessary parts and everything is as good as new.

This, tangentially, is why I rarely call tech support lines. 99.899% of the time I have ever spent on support lines involves having some idiot tell me to try something I already tried, which didn't work, which is why I called and then waiting to be escalated to someone with a brain. 0.1% is me telling someone in tier not-completely-clueless exactly what they need to do at their end to fix my problem. The other 0.001% are those semi-miraculous exceptions where I get a good suggestion.