BALDWIN EYE CLINIC ONE HOUR

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The waiting area is small, cramped and unpleasant. The chairs are hard and uncomfortable, esp when kept waiting over an hour for an appointment I'd made the week before. No staff member ever acknowledged the wait, I assume it's SOP here. After Dr. Adcock was finished, I was sent back to the front desk area, to pick out a pair of glasses. I had a headache and was irritated with them for being kept waiting so long before my appointment, so I told them I'd come back and select a pair on another day. I won't be back and I wouldn't recommend this place to friends or family.

The office has been portioned out by sales potential. That means the lab has a hefty chunk of floor space, the waiting area is a hallway-like afterthought, the examination rooms are like nothing so much as claustrophobia cubicles and 50% of space is for display of the available frames. Waiting room furnishings are old and uncomfortable and after waiting for 40 minutes I'm not sure if I did or did not read a National Geographic dated March 21, 1963. Several ladies in the Paperwork and Scheduling Corral do their jobs fairly adequately but without much friendliness. There was also an issue with their memories when I returned a week later for copies of my husband's prescription and office visit and was advised they couldn't release them. Strange, because when he and I were there together the week before, we made it very clear that since he had to return to his deployment overseas (before his glasses were completed), I would be back to pick everything up. Luckily there was one woman in the Corral who remembered/understood the situation and I was allowed to walk out with the new glasses and his prescription. The office visit document was mailed to the house. (Yes, I had a military Power of Attorney. Yes, I had paid for the glasses and the office visits.) The tech who rescued me from Waiting Room Purgatory didn't introduce herself as she ushered me into one of the cubicles but that wasn't as curious as her failure to introduce the optometrist. To be fair, he didn't think it was important either and to this day, I have no idea what his name was. I will always be able to recognize him from the dandruff collection on the navy blue cotton jacket he keeps in the office just for examinations. This was the first time during a refraction that they refused to do a pupil dilation. This is a normal part of an annual examination and especially important for people with certain health issues, say, diabetes or a history of cataracts. Not here. When I asked, they said that was up to someone's general practitioner. Oh, okay. During the part of the exam to fine-tune the prescription, the practitioner began exhibiting signs of frustration because I wasn't choosing one lens over another as quickly as he thought I should. When I explained that I was doing the best I could, he said it was probably because I had 'one eye that went up and another that went down'. SAY WHAT? So after wearing corrective lenses for 48 years, suddenly I have a weird type of lazy eye? I doubt it. But with his abrasiveness, I'll just go elsewhere and try it again. And so will my family. NOTE: The ladies who assist with selling and fitting frames were fantastic. It's just not worth running the gauntlet of the other characters to get to them.

The lady who helped me choose new frames went above and beyond what I was expecting. She was very knowledgeable about my insurance and what they would cover. She also had the patience of a saint and focused solely on me during the decision making process.

They are very good at their job, and you are not there all day.