I’m usually smarter than the following would lead you to believe. Honest.
When I buy clothes, I’ve got a pretty short attention span. I go for stuff that looks like stuff I already have, and my main requirements are that it isn’t paisley or polka-dotted or clown-striped. Or micro-fibre. I HATE that stuff. So yeah, me = not picky. I rarely even try on clothes in the fitting room- so much so for a while there I was referring to it as the “trying-on-clothes booth”.
You may see where this is going.
A couple of weeks ago Jeff and I were in Costco, buying a metric ton of dryer sheets and a whole cow when I caught sight of a giant table piled with several hundred pairs of pants. My job holds a mild dress code in that you can pretty much come as you are as long as you are wearing not-jeans and a shirt with some kind of collar. The pairs of pants I’d been wearing for a while were identical to each other and so I was guessing people at work thought I just had the one pair, and hey, look at the cheap Costco pants.
Taking a closer look, I was delighted- these were cargoes made out of some weird wicking cotton-ballistic nylon stuff. I’m a sucker for outdoor gear and these were the perfect casual-dress to work / survive-the-apocalypse type of pants. They were also wicked cheap and in the earth-tone / possibly-used-as-camouflage colours I tend to stick to. So I chucked ‘em in the cart next to the cow and we went to the till.
When we got home, I tried the magical pants on and found out two things:
- I should try on clothes before buying them. My new pants were too long.
- I should have kept the instructions, (yes, these pants came with instructions) because the built in ballistic-nylon belt had a freaky carbon-fibre buckle with a weird lever-y kinda catch that was difficult to figure out. More on this later.
Still, I was happy with my new super-adventure pants, and a few days ago brought them to Stitches to get them hemmed. Here’s where the fun starts to end.
First, the lady behind the counter was an evil Russian lady. Since my hearing crapped out in Achinsk while teaching ESL I’ve disliked Russians, and I figured this was a bad omen. She curtly pointed to the try-on-your-pants room and I went and hauled them on. I stood, she pinned, it was a delight for everyone involved. Anyways…
I get back to the fitting room, would you believe I had to Google the term because it kept dancing around on the tip of my tongue, and then went to change back to my regular pants.
This is where the fun began. I couldn’t get out of my pants. The stupid fancy carbon-blahblah buckle won’t UNbuckle.
I spent a solid minute trying to sort it out, which is a long time when you’re trapped in your pants. Finally I stopped, and being the guy that I am, hauled out my phone and Tweeted that I was trapped in a fitting room and couldn’t get my pants off.
Priorities, people. I has ‘em.
There’s only so many ways to hold your pants up, so after trying most of them in reverse I finally figure out that you turn while pushing and twisting and Saturn has to be in the elliptic and during the third Tuesday of every month and that’s how you unbuckle the super-adventure pants and oh, is that why they were going for $24.99 at Costco?
Anyone who wants to give my a hard time about this, let me know and I’ll come over and make you wear the newly-named pants of doom. You can try to take ‘em off anytime you like.
