The two answers at the optician's counter

An optician in Salmiya has heard the same complaint for a year. Customers wait two weeks for new lenses, and the shop across the road does it in three days.

There are two ways to answer that, and he has tried both.

The first is to say there is no real problem. The complaints come from a handful of impatient people. Most customers are perfectly happy. The shop across the road cuts corners anyway. And the people grumbling about speed are the same ones who haggle over the price of the frames. Every one of those sentences protects the way things are done today, and not one of them shortens the wait.

The second answer arrives once the first stops working. Yes, he admits, the wait is long. But the workshop arrangement was settled years ago, the supplier is the supplier, and changing any of it now would be pointless this late in the day.

These sound like opposites. One denies the problem and the other confesses it. Yet they end in the same place, with the counter staying exactly as it is.

Neither is honest. The wait is real, and the hour is not too late, because nothing about a two-week wait was fixed by nature. It is a set of choices that someone made and someone else can unmake.

I hear both answers far beyond opticians. In families, in neighbourhoods, in businesses of every size, the defence of the present nearly always arrives in one of these two forms.

The useful thing is to recognise them when they turn up, and to say so plainly.