I have a fairly interesting (I hope) predicament regarding my vision, eyeglasses, and safety at my regional in the next few days, and I was wondering if you safety experts could help me out.
Last Friday, I broke my glasses beyond repair at a concert. Since then, my only pair of corrective lenses is a pair of polarized sunglasses. Darkened lenses present a slight safety hazard at FIRST events, and assuming I don’t get a new pair of glasses tomorrow morning, may cause trouble for me at Connecticut.
In the worst case scenario, I have three choices:
Wear my sunglasses and safety glasses, the darkness causing a safety hazard.
Wear no lenses and safety glasses, blurry nearsighted vision causing a safety hazard.
Do not enter CT’s pit area, adversely affecting my team’s performance
Which is the most reasonable and safest option? Does anyone have suggestions for other measures I could take?
I would go with the normal safety glasses option. For the future to prevent something like this it may be in your best interest to invest in safety glasses with prescription lenses. FYI: Alex (our driver) doesn’t wear his glasses during competition.
Talk to the people at the event and explain your story with that you are not trying to be cool, but you need to wear the sun glasses. If the event is light(lighter than WPI) I think you should be fine.
I’d say it depends on how bad your eyesight is uncorrected. Mine is around 20/40 in 1 eye and 20/60 in the other. It’s a real pain to wear safety glasses that fit over my regular glasses so I usually remove them when and just wear the safety glasses when I’m in the pit. I can still see well enough to read signs but I certainly wouldn’t operate any machinery without them.
I think that the dark sunglasses are more hazardous to wear because while everything may be sharp it may be too dark to safely work on a robot.
My vision is 20 / 300 in one eye and 20 / 400 in another, so it’s not very cut and dry. In order to clearly read the text on my laptop right now I have to wear sunglasses. I’m okay with shapes from most distances, but not textures.
Sunglasses. If the safety folks have a problem with that, ask them if it’s safer to be handling machinery you can barely see due to not being able to see it, or that you can see, though it’s darker than normal.
If they don’t like that explanation, then you’re going to be spending an awful lot of time in the stands…
As long as the sunglasses are ANSI safety approved, I’d use them and explain to pit admin that without them you would present more of a safety hazard than with them.
Wear the sunglasses. If a Safety person ask you about them say "The future, in FIRST, is so bright I got to wear shades’.
Not much helps is it
Seriously, wear the sunglases with safety glasses over them if they are UL or ANSI approved.
Or walk around with a white stick with a red tip
Haha. That’s awesome. I would say wear the sunglasses, but it looks like you got the situation handled. Our driver from 2008, and now mentor, would only wear his glasses to drive the robot, not even drive his car.
I am missing a significant piece of my iris in one eye (from not wearing my safety goggles ironically) and in any environment that is reasonably well lit I need to wear tinted lenses. At VCU the people patrolling the pits absolutely refuse to allow any kind of tinted lenses, and even when I explained my situation they refused to let me wear my tinted safety goggles, so instead I get to wear clear (or amber) safety goggles and squint or close my bad eye. This is what they consider to be safer. After all, who really needs depth perception when working on a robot.
Indeed. I see so MANY people at regionals with these thin plastic side shields that look like overhead transparency film and ‘normal’ glasses, and I want to scream at them. Me, I spent $300 on a pair of real prescription safety glasses - I’d rather be a poor man with good eyes than a blind poser.
Hey, I’ll do it for free. (Now lemme see, where’s that laser pointer I had???) ::safety::
