Safety goggles for people with glasses

Ever since I’ve come to the University of Waterloo, I’ve never seen a pair of safety goggles that are suitable for use by people with prescription glasses. All I see are flimsy little wraparounds that barely fit around my head, never mind my glasses as well.  I find this stocking practice vaguely discriminatory and mildly unsafe.

And yes, I realize that the Chem stores sell goggles that fit over my glasses, but is that really a reasonable purchase to make for someone who might be in the lab twice a term? Moreover, is it fair to require only the glasses-wearers of a class to invest in rubber optical accessories? (Hint: it’s not, unless you subsidize them too)

 There are not a lot of options when all you have are a box of the cheap close-fitting visor-type safety glasses. I could refuse to wear safety goggles and rely on prescription glasses for protection, but debris could still fly into my eyes from the sides and top of the glasses. I could wear the goggles over my prescription glasses, which clearly does not impede the path of flying debris from above or the side either, and is uncomfortable to boot. I could wear the glasses over the goggles, but this alters the focusing effect of the lenses and makes the floor look ten feet away. I could ditch my prescription glasses and wear the goggles alone but honestly my prescription is pretty bad and I’d probably fall over a concrete cylinder onto a similarly-coloured concrete floor at some point.

Now most laboratory exercises that undergraduate students participate in are relatively harmless, but in the off-chance that there are flying shards of concrete, should not the lab be equipped with goggles that fit students of levels of all optical abilities? Does the university want to get sued?

In conclusion, it is unreasonable to ask students of a class to don safety goggles when a goggle shape suitable to the needs of spectacled students is unavailable.