The pleasure of being opticians

When I first came into this world, I never imagined that I would fall in love with it. Life often takes you to places you never thought you would go, unfamiliar places you did not prepare for, and presents them to you perfectly packaged with shiny paper… What is going to be in it?

Your choice hinges on the curiosity to know what lies beneath and the unknowing human courage that will keep the helm straight in any situation. Beneath the golden surface an intricate tangle of difficulties, but then you realize as you go along what it really means to be an optician…

I often find myself talking to colleagues about how time in the store is always short, dense, and crowded between the myriad things to be done. Every customer we choose to take care of in response to the trust dictated by his choice to cross the threshold of our store is a small world for us that unravels into a thousand streams.

“The cash drawer” to which the business of an optical store is now too often reduced in this industry taken by storm, is actually one of the steps and happens naturally for an independent optician. We, who experience every single aspect of this work firsthand, without intermediaries and galactic superstructures over our heads to be put before the needs of those who come to us, start from people’s eyes and try to go through them in any way we know how.

We have studied and continue to study to get into it, use our time to understand what they see, how they see, how much they see, by which definition, and often even what they “want to see.”

We live in the desire-necessity to ensure with the devices we manage the clearness, visual comfort, precision of focus, accuracy. We enter or at least try to enter the perception of those in front of us and describe it to us in order to preserve or improve it with a pair of glasses, with a contact lenses sometimes with a magnifying glass.

We support conveying the images of the world around us into people’s lives by following the path of light in their eyes.
We travel every day in the wonderful world of the eyes that unravels in the relationship between light, chemistry and biology, and we must know it very well, explore and interpret it thoroughly, ask ourselves questions, seek advice and help from experts in every field to give the necessary support.

We are bombarded every day with a multitude of information and input of all sorts, from technological innovations pouring into increasingly sophisticated ophthalmic lenses and the latest in frames, designs, innovative materials, new forms, new lightness.

We learn every day simply by listening to our world, we have our hands so full that often it is only the fear of adding more to the daily load what that holds us back from certifying our knowledge and experience with a new title, even though we have in our daily lives everything we need to get it.

This year in a MIDO that finally re-enters our lives with its explosive driving force of novelty and innovation, there will be much talk about the figure of the optician and his important and essential relationship with the medical world in contexts where institutions are invited to the necessary attention.

The hope is always twofold: that on the one hand, the social and institutional context will absorb and fully exploit the full potential of such a complex figure as the optician, and on the other hand, that the category will become aware of its role and respect the rights and duties arising from it.

… It is a pleasure to be an optician!