The Mythical Pants

The story about the pants.

So, on a Sunday, my boyfriend says he wants a new pair of dark gray pants. We go to the store. And because he is a dude, he finds a pair that "will do" within milliseconds of having stepped into the men's department. He doesn't want to try them on before buying them, but he thinks maybe he'd better.

He tries them on, and in less than 15 seconds he declares them "good." (Sometimes I wonder if dudes are afraid clothing is set to self-destruct in the fitting rooms if worn too long.)

He buys the pants. We take them home.

My boyfriend wears the pants to work the next day. Mid-morning I get a text message: "My pant cuffs are two different sizes."

I text back: "That's ok, we can re-hem them to be the same width."

"No, not the hem, the openings are two different sizes."

"What?"

"My stupid pants have two different leg sizes."

After he gets home from work that day, he shows me. The openings at the ankles were hemmed to be two noticeably different sizes, off by at least an inch, maybe an inch and a half.

"Weird. OK, well I'll exchange them for you tomorrow," I say to him.

Easy enough, right?

The next day, while at work, I call the store where we purchased the pants. They tell me they don't have any pairs left that are my boyfriend's size. "But," they say, "we can give you the number to the next nearest store location. You can call and see if they have the correct size."

The next nearest store location happens to be half the distance to the moon, but fine. Whatever. My boyfriend really liked this pair of pants, and that only happens maybe two, three times in a guy's entire life.

So I call and explain the situation again. The lady there says, "You know what ... we just have so many pairs of gray men's pants here that it might just be best for you to come down here so we can match them up."

"Are you sure? I really don't want to drive all the way over there unless you're absolutely certain that you have so many pairs of pants in stock that we'll be guaranteed to find the pair I'm looking for, in the correct size."

"Oh I'm sure," she says. "We have tons."

I drive to the store, I find this lady, I show her the pants. "Ah yes, I know exactly which ones these are." And she says to follow her. We walk up to a wall of pants. She takes a moment to look through a couple stacks and then finally says, "You know what ... we just don't have that size. Yeah, see, we have this one and this one and that one, but we just don't have this pant in that size."

"But if you want," she tells me, "you can take these pants back to Customer Service and they can call all the different stores in the area and find out which ones do have it."

All right. I'm here. Might as well.

I show the people at Customer Service the pants. "Oh gawd, those are awwwful," they say. And, "Yeah, those aren't supposed to be like that." I know. That's why I'm trying to get rid of them. Please, take them. Please take them away.

I don't really need to recap the next experience. Suffice it to say that the next 60+ minutes involved a kind employee calling every store in the Phoenix metro area, trying to track down this pair of pants.

(And I don't like to be the kind of person who monopolizes all of a customer service employee's time, I really don't. So I just wanted to add here that it wasn't busy in the store, and the employee who helped me didn't look like he had much else to do.)

However, the phone calls all end in "no." And now at this point, I'm like, who cares, we'll just order them online.

"Can I return these without the card they were purchased on?" I ask. "We bought them with my boyfriend's card."

"Not unless you want a gift card or store credit."

"Um, no thanks," I say. "Nevermind, we'll just return them later."

I go back to work. My coworker asks me if I died and came back to life over my lunch hour. I say no, I had to try to return some pants. He tunes out. I begin working again.

I go home. I explain to my boyfriend about the pants and how they are apparently otherwise mythical except that we do own the only pair in that size in the whole state of Arizona, and it's too bad that they were made wrong. He thanks me for trying to get rid of them.

We wait until the weekend. We go back to the first store to return the pants. I hand the Customer Service employee the pants and the receipt. My boyfriend stands beside me, ready to reach for his debit card when the time arises. The lady does some fancy typing and clicking.

"All right," she says. "You're all set. The amount is being returned to your card."

I'm confused. "So you don't need us to swipe the card again for you?"

"Nope, that's all," she says, cheerily, and smiles at us.

We go home. We order the pants from a different company's website. They should be here by the end of this week. Hopefully. And the pant legs had better be the right size.