ECPs Share Their Lowest Points During the Pandemic

IN AN EFFORT to interject some levity into what can sometimes feel like a heavy exercise, we asked Big Survey respondents to share their lowest points during the pandemic via the cheeky question: “Gwyneth Paltrow broke down and ate bread during quarantine. What was your lowest point?”

The responses we received varied. Some featured the same tongue-in-cheek tone of the question, while others sounded like the start of country western song and really hit us in the feels. Here is a summary of how your fellow eyecare pros delt with the challenges of the last 18 months.

• “Playing video games until 4 a.m.!”
• “Ate too much of everything.”
• “Tequila.”
• “Lots of bourbon.”
• “We won’t talk about how long my leg hair was….”
• “Checking the fridge every 20 minutes to see if there was anything new in there.”
• “Stopped working out.”
• “Texting with an ex who I knew wanted an affair.”
• “Not changing clothes for a full week.”
• “Not getting out of bed until 2 p.m.”
• “TIGER KING.”
• “Working in my PJs.”
• “Finishing Hulu.”
• “No haircut or hair color.”
• “McDonald’s for dinner.”
• “Over-drinking and overthinking.”
• “I ate bread, candy, all the sugar I could get my hands on.”
• “Thinking about applying at Kroger when the office closures were extended.”
• “Started wearing scrubs and I stopped wearing a real bra.”
• “Participating in an occasional TikTok video as my wife was pumping out her bored-in-the-house videos.”
• “I looked at donuts on the internet, breaking my cardinal rule not to look at donuts on the internet.”
• “Watching optical videos on YouTube to get my fix.”

The 2021 Big Survey was carried out between September and October, attracting nearly 400 anonymous responses from owners and managers of independent vision businesses across the United States. The full results were published in the November issue of INVISION and are available online.