When there's a diversity of trousers

The weekend before last I went into the city to buy clothes and I ended up walking out of the store with two pairs of trousers and three long-sleeve shirts to complement my existing cold-season wardrobe (although truthfully I wear this sort of outfit pretty much throughout the year; next summer will be about a year since I last lived in Queensland so we'll see if I will start to feel the warmth of the southern summer; I certainly did not feel the heat last summer in Sydney, so it was long-sleeves and trousers every day after relocating last February).

The thing about the trousers that turned out to be a little strange is that even though they were identically labelled the trousers were very different in fit and finish, and I had to take both of them to the tailor for adjustment. I just came back from the tailor the second time this morning in fact.

The blue trousers were a good 5cm longer than the black ones, for a start. So when I spoke with the tailor up the street she got me to put the blue trousers on so she could fix a good length with a pin prior to doing the work after I left. I like my trousers a bit shorter than most people, I gauge, so it took a few tries before we got the right length. The blue trousers also had button holes that were not large enough for the attached buttons, so I asked the tailor to mend those as well. (Changing the length of the trousers ended up being a lot cheaper in Sydney than the same procedure cost me back on the Coast.) I got the blue trousers back from the tailor last week and they now fit fine, and they have been washed.

The black trousers fit fine and had perfect leg length from the time they were purchased but what turned out to be at fault with this pair was that the lining of the back, right-side pocket was not sewn away properly as it should have been. So I took the black trousers back to the tailor's yesterday and they returned them this morning fixed and in good order.

It's curious though how different the two pairs of trousers turned out to be. Apart from the length of the leg, the blue trousers also have pockets that are not big enough. My keys and mobile phone just barely fit in these pockets and I have a mind - before some disaster takes place and I lose something valuable in the street - to get the pockets enlarged to make them the right size to suit my needs. I can only think that the trousers must have been made in different factories or by different companies, because by the time they arrived in the department store they were labelled exactly the same. Same type of label, same description, same size, same cut. It's a mystery.