With all due respect to Dorothy Parker, I’m not entirely sure whether the wearing of eyeglasses will any way impact your love life, let alone marital status. Then again, the satirist and Round Table founder may have been on to something judging from the “medical history” that customers of prescription eyewear chain LensCrafters are asked to complete.
Not only will your LC optician be guided by information about whether you tied the knot. But in an obvious nod to political correctness, the questionnaire offers nearly as many choices for “marital status” as Baskin and Robbins does ice cream flavors.
PJ Media’s Paula Bolyard was handed an iPad that had the following item on the first page (of many):
Interlocutory is presumably shorthand for “interlocutory appeal,” (also known as “interim appeal”), which is a legal term that figures in some divorce proceedings. Perhaps eyeglass wearers going through the process of uncoupling need precision lenses to read the fine print. As for the other possibilities, and especially “polygamous,” it’s anybody’s guess why they were included.
“We’ve all become accustomed to intrusive questions about our personal lives,” Bolyard muses before noting:
Years ago doctors asked about your marital status so they’d know where to send the bill and they asked about your race and ethnic background solely because there were certain diseases and disorders endemic to some ethnicities.
Nowadays, of course, information — especially saved in an electronic format — is money, but that still doesn’t explain the categories on this form.
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