I’ve had to wear glasses since I was six. As any responsible child, I would break my glasses often. This story was relayed to me by my father and siblings, so I can’t vouch that it hasn’t been embellished, but this is how it was told to me.
My dad was sick of having to buy glasses every few months and was complaining to the guy at the counter about it.
Employee: *Smirking* “One moment, sir.”
He went into the back and returned with the thinnest glasses frame my dad had ever seen, thinner than pencil lead.
Dad: *Laughing* “Oh, he’ll break those in less than a day!”
Employee: “If you can break them, you can have them.”
So, cue my dad bending them 90°,180°, twisting, pulling, and stomping — these things were indestructible (I assume the lenses were empty). It turned out these things were made of titanium with memory; basically, these puppies would always return to their original shape and were near impossible to break.
My dad, thinking about the future money he’d save not ever buying me glasses again, ended up buying me a pair, bragging about it and everything.
These things were not cheap at all; they were R2000 (about 122USD, a lot of money at the time of this story) and had to be shipped with the lenses to Europe so they could be super heated to be malleable enough to put the lenses in and then shipped back.
Less than a week later, I came home from school.
Me: “I’ve broken my glasses again.”
He laughed and I showed them to him. They were fully bent 90° at the nose bit. My dad stared and tried to bend them back. SURPRISE! IT SNAPPED BACK TO THE 90° ANGLE!
Yeah, tiny child me had somehow changed this thing’s memory enough so it returned to its unusable 90° bend. My dad took it back to the shop, and the guy was dumbfounded. It shouldn’t be possible; you can only do this by super heating it with specific machinery. It should be physically impossible for me to have done this. No one even knew how I’d done it; I just said, “They broke.”
They offered to send them back for free, but my dad took this as a challenge. If I could bend it, surely he could unbend it. Apparently, for the next three to five months, this was all he could think about because, no matter what my father did to these titanium glasses, they just snapped back.
This story has a sad ending: the glasses got lost — no one remembers how or why — and the dream was given up on, and I went back to cheap frames.
Whenever the story is brought up, my family describes how my dad was basically unraveled and raving like a mad man about how he couldn’t fix them. (For context, my dad grew up on a farm before moving to the city to become an IT guy, so this man is buff and knows how to use a lot of expensive tools. Those glasses broke.)
