SAW...in more ways than one.

It has struck me how much we trust people in doctorly professions.

I have just come back from one of the most physically traumatic experiences of my life: a contact-lens consultation. In the past hour I allowed a complete stranger to assault my eyes with shards of glass which felt like being stabbed in the face. I even allowed him to do this repeatedly, even after it hurt the first time. I also allowed him to dab my eyes with yellow stuff, that was probably iodine, but could just as easily have been bottled piss.

It's a very strange social convention, allowing perfect strangers to do things like this under the assumption that they have training sufficient to do it. You don't walk into a doctors and demand to see their certificates; you don't go demanding credentials from a man in an optician's outfit, no matter how like a Saw movie the scenario winds up. It's completely unnatural, surely, to allow a stranger to do things to you that you wouldn't so much as let your parents think about doing.

And yet we do it every day.
Freaky.