Dean Wormer

My favorite personal example still has to be my sharp rise and crashing fall from Optometry College.  I was 4 1/2 years through a 6 year program when Dean Wormer booted me to the curb and justifiably so.   Really, this guy looked like Dean Wormer.  He was not a friendly guy.  "Relaxed" is not a word that comes to mind when I think of him.  "Kind," sympathetic," or "understanding are also not words that come to mind.  The only word that does come to mind is "Dean Wormer."  My recollection is that he had on a gray three piece suit that color-coordinated beautifully with his gray complexion.  He sort of looked like meat that was several days past its spoil date.  The only words that I can remember him saying were "if you quit you can't come back" or something like that.  For the life of me I couldn't tell you the sequence of events - phone calls or notes or the like - which led to me sitting in his office.  I wonder what I was wearing?  Hopefully, a Black Sabbath T-shirt.  I mean if you're going to flush several years of your life down the poop hole do it with some attitude, right?  It felt to me like the brief interval after you fall off of something high but before you land on something hard - my brain was trying to process the magnitude of the disaster.

At the time it seemed like the disaster to top all disasters.  Today it still seems like a pretty big disaster.  But I look back and wonder what my life would have been like if I had moved from A to B in this educational pursuit and graduated on time with my class.  I probably would have bought a practice in The Old City where I would have repeated the same basic examinations for 40 years in a windowless exam room.  I would probably still be doing this.  I would probably be in that exam room still.  I don't think I would have found an escape route.  I would never have moved to Chicago and met SuperK.  

Moreover, optometry is a profession that has changed markedly over the years as have many medical professions.  It used to be that every neighborhood had a physician, an eye doctor, a pharmacy, everyone operating as a stand-alone business.  Today if you want an eye exam you're as likely to end up in a Costco or a Wal-Mart as anywhere else.  I walk by the little exam area that they've built into a corner of the local Costco and peer in at the optometrist sitting in there. He has to show up at a certain time and then leave at the end of the day.  "Captain of his own ship" is not a phrase that comes to mind.  He looks like an actor on a set in a big warehouse in Burbank, California.

Everything is going to be OK.