Pocket paper perplexity

I don’t like shop­ping for cloth­ing very much, and it shows: my wardrobe over­whelm­ing­ly con­sists of solid-color shirts, jeans and the same kind of sneak­ers in a few dif­fer­ent col­ors. Stick­ing to basics keeps things sim­ple. Hmm, does this plain t‑shirt come in black? I’ll take it!

So yes­ter­day, while at a local out­let mall, I did some­thing I did­n’t real­ly enjoy: I bought a new pair of jeans. I had to dig through a few clear­ance racks before com­ing across a pair I did­n’t dis­like that much, one that actu­al­ly fit me with­out suf­fer­ing from the inten­tion­al dis­tress­ing that the cool kids seem to favor these days. I would have ini­tial­ly liked my cho­sen pair even more if they did­n’t suf­fer from this funky (that means “bad”) col­or pat­tern sewn into the back pock­ets. The pants are made by Mec­ca, and accord­ing to an attached tag, fea­ture a “rock­er fit.” (Oblig: \m/) I sup­pose this is to dif­fer­en­ti­ate from most of their clothes, which fea­ture a hip-hop fit.

I decid­ed to try them on for size (a phrase nobody uses lit­er­al­ly these days!) regard­less, and per­haps hav­ing caught a look at them in the fit­ting room mir­ror, found myself… actu­al­ly lik­ing them, even sort of appre­ci­at­ing the funky (that means “good”) col­or pattern!

So I bought them. Arriv­ing home, I put them on and noticed the famil­iar rus­tle of paper in the pock­ets… except I could­n’t imag­ine why that would hap­pen, unless the receipt had some­how slipped in. I reached into the rear pock­et to remove the paper and found that it did­n’t eas­i­ly slide out on its own. I pulled hard­er, heard a soft ‘tear’ sound and found myself hold­ing some­thing that looked like newsprint.

I kept pulling and, as you can see, pro­duced a good amount of paper scraps from the pock­ets. Per­haps not sur­pris­ing is that many of them include clothing-related infor­ma­tion, but what of the “fork­lift pock­ets,” which seem to dif­fer from pants pock­ets? Or the seem­ing­ly ran­dom phone num­ber scrap?

I could still feel a lit­tle bit of paper in the pock­ets; I changed into anoth­er pair of pants so I could have a clos­er look at these. I turned the pock­ets inside-out, and this is what I found:

To state the obvi­ous, it looks like the process used to cre­ate those col­or­ful pat­terns on the pock­ets involves sewing newsprint onto the reverse side of the pants. Not being a big tex­tile enthu­si­ast, I can’t imag­ine what pur­pose that the paper serves, but I’m guess­ing it should have been removed before leav­ing the fac­to­ry in Pakistan.

With Eng­lish being the offi­cial lan­guage of Pak­istan, and wide­ly used in com­merce, I sup­pose it’s not much of a sur­prise to find paper from there with Eng­lish writ­ing on it.

I just was­n’t expect­ing to find any­thing of the sort, you know, in my pants.

10 thoughts on “Pocket paper perplexity”

  1. I am proud of you expand­ing your jean-pocket-design horizons.

    Also, you for­got the thumb. OR DID YOU?!

        1. Maybe |\m/|// ?
          or |\m/|᜶

          Does this have to be repro­ducible with a stan­dard key­board? :D

          1. Lol, the last one looks like the thumb is a lit cig­a­rette. Lovin’ the options though. I think the first one |\m/|ⅉ is my favorite although if the per­son typ­ing is in a hur­ry, |\m/|// will be accept­able. Glad that’s set­tled now. :)

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