My glasses fell apart while I was attempting to clean them. The little tiny screw fell out, so the lens was no longer in a captive state, and the carpet in my office is not designed to make nanoscrews stand out to the casual (or even interested) observer, especially if you can’t wear your corrective lenses. Searching on hands-and-knees while holding a flashlight is a pain to do while simultaneously holding a lens in place.

Hence the conundrum. How do you find the screw, and fix your glasses, if you need glasses to see things like that?

A search, even while wearing my old (i.e. backup) glasses, revealed nothing. CSI training to the rescue! I took the dustbuster and emptied it and vacuumed around where I had been sitting. Then I opened it up and discovered the screw, along with a bunch of other stuff — I’ll be generous and say the custodial staff’s vacuuming efforts under the desk aren’t efficient because of space restrictions, rather than curse them for not bothering to vacuum under the desk. (I also discovered that my chocolate-chip granola bars have been shedding chips at a higher rate than I had thought, but these defectors had been camouflaged by the carpeting in low-light conditions)

Here’s the screw

(Just kidding. That’s a novelty dime, about 3″ across)

So, success. I later checked and found that the screw is indeed ferromagnetic, but since the frames are Titanium, I wasn’t sure that a magnet would be a useful tool. My backup plan was to take a screw out of my backup glasses. The backup glasses themselves only represent a bare minimum of vision redundancy, because they are not bifocals. The few minutes of wearing them was a stark reminder of how crappy my near-field vision is — they were essentially no help at all in doing the repair work.

One other bootstrapping problem that confronts many physicists is this: I can’t function without my morning coffee. How do you make coffee without having had any coffee? Luckily I partake of caffeine in can form (artificially-sweetened), thus avoiding that issue.