“Should have gone to Specsavers” – please share your embarrassing moments with Specsavers - you could win £250! *NOW CLOSED*

[KathrynMumsnet]

We all know the tag line for Specsavers is "should have gone to Specsavers" - now they would love to know what your "should have gone to Specsavers" moments are - when your mouth seemed to move quicker than your brain and you made an embarrassing error - for example - have you mistaken a stranger for your DH, thought someone was pregnant when they weren't or even waved madly at someone across the street only to find you don't know them at all?

Specsavers say "on our stores, you can be sure to find the glasses that are just right for you - our online catalogue of over 1500 glasses is the widest selection in the UK. We're always sourcing the latest materials and following fashions from around the world to bring you an unequalled choice - the latest fashions, designer labels, materials, colours and frame shapes. We also offer a wide range of contact lenses to suit most people".

Share your best "should have gone to Specsavers" moment (or have a LOL about everyone else’s) on this thread and you will be entered into a prize draw where one MNer will win a £250 voucher from here.

Please note Specsavers may use your comments - anon of course - on their pages on MN, on their social media or possibly elsewhere - please only post if you're happy with this.

Thanks and good luck,
MNHQ

Just started dating my DH and arranged to meet him during a night out with friends. Coming in from a freezing cold outdoors to a warm pub caused my specs to mist up so I took them off. I spotted my DH and crept up behind him and kissed him on the neck. My "DH" turned round and his horrified face matched mine as I realised he was in fact a stranger wearing the same jacket.......enjoying a date night with his wife!

Not really my story to tell but my best beloved thought he would like glasses, felt they would add some gravitas. We all trooped to the optician with him and waited while he had his eyes tested. To his disappointment he didn't need any, but he thanked them all very much, turned to leave and tried to walk straight through their plate glass window. Oh how we all laughed :)

When my next door neighbours first moved in, all the Koi in their fish pond died and they were genuinely upset.

A few hours later, the guy, his wife, their son and an older couple I assumed were their inlaws, were all stood around the pond with their heads bowed, while he read some words in another language from what looked like a prayer book.

As they all trotted indoors, I smiled sympathetically and said "That's nice, were you saying a prayer for the fish?"

He just looked at me blankly and said, "No, I was reading the instruction manual for the new pond filter"

Ooops!

I do a few charity things which mean I meet a lot of women who have had babies but due to volume I can rarely remember exactly where I know them from or names. So I just tend to be polite and smile a lot and ask questions about "your little one".

One day I spotted one of these women in Boots and not wanting to be rude gave her a big smile and started to give her a big wave. I was mid-arc when I realised I don't know her at all - she is Someone Famous Off The Telly. So I diverted arm into elaborate hair smoothing.

Gosh I looked a twat and this poor woman just stared at me

I was out running one day, and thought I saw someone I knew on the otherside of the road, also out running. Big wave, shouted hello, crossed road. It wasn't them.

But it turned out well as actually she is a lovely person, and she encouraged me to give triathlon a go - this lady is 68 and competes regularly

DH works next door to an opticians (not SS). He's forever getting people walking in and sitting in front of him thinking he is the Optometrist

Haven't got one myself but DW told me about the time last summer when she saw (or thought she saw) an ex, with whom she'd had a highly charged affair (but it ended badly) some twenty years ago...

Out shopping locally with one of her friends and into Pret A Manger walks 'ex lover' with a woman (obviously his current DP). DW immediately thought "that's XYZ" and kept staring at him but he took no notice. She and friend then 'stalked' him around the shopping centre, although she admitted to having no idea why because she said she wouldn't really have wanted to talk to him!

Anyway, only when they literally nearly bumped into each other coming out of/going into a lift did DW realise that it wasn't him (unless he'd made a Dorian Gray pact with the Devil, he'd not aged in all that time!) as he showed absolutely no flicker of recognition of DW at all...

But she's always waving at people who turn out to be complete strangers when they come into focus :-)

This is worse cause I was driving.

I was stopped at a red light at a junction when I spotted someone walking past the shops on the other side of the road with a small dog trotting beside them. Assuming it to be some kind of Chihuahua I mused I didn't know they bred them in that colour now.

As I drove past I realised it was a pigeon.

As a teenager we lived out in the sticks and so my mum drove us to the first bus stop on the route.

Once we we were late and stage drove us a bit further down the route. I jumped out and ran to the bus, for the briefest of moments I turned back to wave goodbye and as I looked forward again ran smack into a lampost hitting the whole of the side of my face.

The whole bus saw and annoyingly I didn't miss it and had to get onto the school bus to a round of applause.

As a teenager "mortified" doesn't begin to explain how I felt.

(as an aside, I am very wary of large dogs)

In my days of vanity as a young teen when glasses weren't as stylish as they were now so wouldn't wear them, I once refused to go and deliver a newspaper to a house because I could "see" (hah) a massive Alsation in the garden.

I later discovered it was a Shetland pony.

I managed to do the nursery pickup, put child in jacket/hat/gloves etc and was on my way out of the door when a member of staff asked 'Oh are you going to mrscumberbatch's for tea?'

It was only then that I stopped and realised that it was not my daughter that I was escorting off the premises.

It was so, so embarrassing. The staff must have thought that I was completely barmy.

Ended up going for laser surgery shortly afterwards...can you blame me?!

I did it today. Had taken my glasses off in a shop because they'd steamed up. Turned around on the escalator to talk to dp, behind me. It wasn't dp. Not-dp's wife did offer to do a swap with me though!

I was on a training course, and in a greak headed for the loos, with a few other people behind me. I was first to the door, and as I pushed it open, there was a plump middle aged woman walking right towards me. I stepped to one side and said "Oh, sorry" - but she also stepped to one side. So then I went to walk ahead again - and so did she.

Yes, that's right. It was a mirror, right opposite the door. And my colleagues behind me had ball just witnessed me talking to myself!

I once got out of the shower, & ran downstairs to the basement kitchen, wearing only a too small towel round my waist, to check something wasn't burning in the oven, & leapt out of my skin at the sight of my husband's best mate pointing a gun at me.

Except it was actually a life sized cardboard Han Solo dh had purchased on ebay, & just left there whilst he worked out what to do with it.

Dh's friend doesn't even look anything like Harrison Ford.

DS1 broke the leg off his glasses. I dropped him off in the shopping centre carpark so he could go to Specsavers to see if they could fix them. He went running into the Post Office about 3 doors down by mistake 'because they both have green ovals'

I was once in a jewellery store on holiday & grabbed who I thought was my husband, draped myself across him & started going on about a piece of jewellery I liked. It was only when my husband said 'put him down' from across the room that I realised it wasn't him! The poor guy was embarrassed & his girlfriend was shooting me daggers all the rest of the time we were in there

I was 15, knew I was very short-sighted, but didn't want glasses as my parents were, unfortunately, very negative about people who wore glasses. I developed coping strategies at school - I would go up to the front to sharpen my pencil and while doing that would memorize huge chunks of what was on the blackboard. One day the teacher was going round the class asking questions about a book we were reading. She wrote helpful notes on the board. I sharpened my pencil but unfortunately had not memorized the bit which had the answer I needed. Everyone else had their hands up because they obviously knew the answer. Eventually I just burst into tears and ran out. I then got glasses!

Once at university I had to have my eyes washed out in the lab, and didn't have any spare contacts or my glasses with me. I had a dance class straight after that I didn't want to miss, so I asked a friend to get me on the right bus because I couldn't read the numbers (on reflection I should really have given up at this point!) and managed to get off in the right place and make it to the hall.

I didn't want to make a fuss, so got on with it (although people came disconcertingly into focus when I got about a foot away). I was there for a lesson before my dance partner, so I asked my friend to look out for him and tell me what colour he was wearing.

She told me he was in red, so at the beginning of the next class I set off confidently towards the red blur, only to realise as I got closer he wasn't my partner and the girl he actually danced with was just behind me looking very at my apparent partner-stealing attempt.

My partner had taken his red jumper off and was creased over laughing on the opposite side of the room...

I settled down to watch some TV and looked around for my brand new glasses, collected that morning. Screen looked a bit blurry and the glasses felt uncomfortable so I took them off to examine them. I noticed the name on the arm wasn't the same as the model I'd ordered. Blimmin' optician has ordered me the wrong ones, I thought.

Rang Vision Express to complain. Explained the situation and was annoyed that the woman on the end of the phone sounded vague somehow. She asked me to confirm my address, which I did.
'And you picked these up this morning, madam?'
'YES.'
'Oh, because the last record we have of you is 8 years ago.'

Ah, that'll be because I'd got my glasses that morning from Specsavers, then, the same optician I'd been using for SEVEN YEARS.

So I rang Specsavers this time and regaled them with the tale of my wrongly ordered glasses.
'Are you OK to hold, madam, and we'll look into this,' I was told.

And it was whilst I was on hold that I scratched my head and realised my brand new glasses were atop my head whilst I was wearing teenage dd's glasses on my nose.

OH THE SHAME.

But when the lady from Specsavers came back on I confessed my idiocy and she was very kind, considering I had been such a colossal muppet.

I am very short sighted. I went swimming in a hotel swimming pool and came out of the water, saw my then DP who was standing facing away from me. I swam over, wrapped my legs around his back and said 'giddy up'

Only it wasn't my DP at all, it was his uncle who had come on holiday with us.

Trying to read an information card in a Stately Home just weeks before a big birthday a fella came up to me and asked 'What's up, arms too short?'

I'm cringing recounting this. I'm 41 and very short-sighted and have an astigmatism but didn't wear glasses full time when I was a child. Just for the blackboard and watching TV. My sister (who has similar eyesight problems) and I had a little trick we used when we wanted to see things in the distance when we didn't have our glasses with us. We used to pull the outer corners of our eyelids - I guess that must have altered our focus slightly.

One day we were waiting outside the chippy in the car while my mum was being served. We saw movement from a window in the same building the chippy was in so both my sis and I did our pulling eyelids trick to try and focus to see who/what it was. Imagine our horror when everything came into focus - it was a little Chinese boy looking straight out the window at us. And there we both were, stretching our eyelids to the side with our fingers!

mine is actually a thread in classics on here. to precis...

saw a dead cat on the way home from work. went back and collected said cat very carefully and stored it overnight. took it to the vets the next day to see if the owner could be found, safe disposal etc.

vet rang a few hours later. it wasn't a dead cat

it was a toy cat

When I was a teenager and out for Sunday lunch my sisters and I went up for A nosy at the gorgeous desserts to see which one we would like. I swore they were surrounded by a glass case, so when the waitress asked me which one i wanted I pointed "that one" at an amazing Black Forest gateau - except there was no class case an. I stuck my forefinger right into the centre of it. Morto and the waitress wasn't too impressed

One of our work phone lines gets a few calls a week for our local Specsavers. The irony that they can't read the phone number correctly...