Hello all :)

After lurking about these boards for the better part of 2 years, have finally decided to register and hopefully participate in the fun!

I am an optometrist from Malaysia, Southeast Asia (if you look for Singapore on a map, Malaysia's the peninsula shaped like a fountain pen nib directly north of Singapore). Graduated somewhere in 2013 from an institute attached to an eye hospital, and have been employed in retail ever since.

While I'm still very, very young in this industry, in the three or so years I've been working, I've rotated through almost a dozen outlets since my boss does own two partnered optical companies. The downside is not exactly having a consistent patient base of my own... but the upside is that in a short time frame, I've had the privilege of working with a wide range of product (Zeiss, Essilor, Hoya, Tokai, Seiko, etc.) save for Shamir, Younger, and Rodenstock. Spectacles, soft lenses, rigid lenses, orthoptics, and also my little share of work in the edging room have kept me content over the last couple of years. If I do get bored on occasion, I sometimes put on some funky music at work, or perhaps revisit Borysko's posts (which I have almost committed to memory thanks to the many laughs that they gave me).

Would like to highlight here that in this corner of the globe, optometrists are rather halfway between an OD and a dispensing optician. We do handle refraction, slit lamps, funduscopy, fitting of contact lenses as well as glasses, basic vision therapy, and consult, but we do not dispense medications or perform procedures such as foreign body removal. Over here, those are in the domain of the local ophthalmologists (who, for their part, rarely ever refract their own patients). This is also reflected in our syllabus for optometry school, whereby we have to complete dispensing courses and carry out basic dispensing in order to fulfill the course requirements.

Phew! That said (I hope it's an adequate introduction!), when I'm not working 10 to 10 in retail, I can usually be found camping, swimming, or keeping entertained with a book/movie/brass instrument.

Cheers to all, and I do hope I'll be able to contribute even one little bit to the massive repository of knowledge you guys already have here! :D