“Remoted – Hybrid” – Day 978 (Sunday) – the mall

Once each year, I have an eye exam. Several years ago around this time of year I realized the year was running out of days and I hadn’t used my vision coverage. That’s how it ended up being this late in the year. The eye doctor I found is located at Pheasant Lane Mall and has Sunday hours. Convenient!

Last year’s appointment was a couple days before Christmas and the mall was packed. Efforts were made to move it out of that time frame. The Sunday before Thanksgiving at the mall seemed better than the days immediately surrounding Christmas. It seemed preferable to a grocery store, for instance.

Imagine my surprise upon arriving at Pheasant Lane Mall at 12:40 to see there was no parking available at the Target end of the mall. It looked like a Black Friday situation. Weird.

Santa story time!

Once inside, it took a couple laps through the mall to find the LensCrafters store and my eye doctor. For whatever reason, despite going there for several years, I never remember where it is located. 

There are very few store locator kiosks left in the mall, but there was a massive QR code displayed on a banner. The QR code linked to a mall website and a minimally helpful search feature. The search for “eye wear” yielded every fashion, accessory, and department store in the mall that sold sunglasses, but not the location of Lenscrafters. After the first search, the site bogged down and I bailed out if it.

A map kiosk was finally located at the foot of an escalator. Lenscrafters was at the furthest point from where I stood and I had already walked past it, but was looking across the mall to the other side when I walked by. Oops.

While engaged in my quest to reach the eye doctor office, Santa read a story to a group of kids seated on the floor at the Santa photos area. Groups of people on quests of their own were sprinting through the mall at top speed and I was nearly trampled several times. The destination seemed to be a very long line that was snaking through most of the length of the main hall and a side walkway on lower level of the mall.

The line extended most of
the length of the mall.

From the upper level, I tried to see what caused hundreds of people to queue up on a Sunday afternoon. The head of the line was near a center aisle kiosk selling tee shirts and hoodies. Once in the eye doctor office, I had a couple minutes to check online to see what the excitement and the long line were about. According to a post, there was the opening of a Recycled Percussion Chaos and Kindness store at noon with a band appearance, photos, and “the final clues to the $10,000!”

The eye exam took fifteen minutes, and when I was done, the long line downstairs was gone. The risk of being trampled was back to normal levels.