ENTRY 04: 09/26/2023 - Wardrobe Malfunction

Bad news, gamers. The Halloween costume I mentioned at the end of the last blog post - or was it a musings post? - has arrived, which is good. Frankly I’m surprised how fast it came, I expected it around mid-October. Unfortunately, the damned thing doesn’t fit! Confound it all! Confound it, I say!

For context, sometime around the middle of this month - September, for all you temporally-displaced folks out there - I ordered a Halloween costume. I figured it’d be smart to order pre-emptively, that way whatever I got would arrive pre-Halloween.

This Halloween would be special, though. I ordered a costume I’ve been meaning to own for many years of my life, since I was but a wee protoplasm: an Organization XIII coat, or something close enough by Amazon’s standards.

It took a long while to find a seller that was putting out anything close to an accurate Organization XIII costume. Each listing I checked had inaccuracies, in the neck chains, in the zippers, in the hood area… I eventually landed on one that had the least amount of inaccuracies, as far as I could tell from the product photo - which was admittedly not that hi-res - and began to make my order.

I was a little suspicious, given that the seller had some kind of generic Chinese name that gave no hints about the nature of the company to my uneducated-in-Chinese-language eyes, and my research into the company proved fruitless, as they did not have a presence online that I could find, besides being a seller of cosplay costumes on Amazon.

Still, there were a scant few product reviews on the page that looked genuine, so I got down to business. Based on their measurement scheme, their standard sizes didn’t fit me properly, so I was forced to order custom. It took me a few minutes more than I would have liked to figure out that, in order to send them the measurements, I would have to use the Amazon seller messaging service that I didn’t know existed.

The process felt kind of loose and unorganized. I had to order the product first, choosing “Customize” from the list of sizes, and then I had to navigate to the seller messaging service of my own volition, and then I could give them the measurements they asked for.

My fears were initially assuaged when they responded fairly promptly, in broken English, assuring me that they’d received the measurements and were hard at work putting the thing together, with a final remark that they’d send me photos to confirm the size once it was complete. The product description said it would take roughly 30-40 days to arrive, so I started waiting.

Fast forward two weeks of radio silence. The package arrives way early, and much to my surprise, the thing doesn’t fit. The arms are all wrong, the shoulders are too narrow, restricting my freedom of movement and resulting in the sleeves being too short. It feels like it was made for someone smaller than me.

I’ve messaged the seller again, asking them about return policies and how I can send this thing back to them, given that I can’t feasibly wear the thing. Hopefully they get back to me. I can’t help but wonder where the miscommunication in all this originated, but at this point I’m just tired and disappointed in the whole affair. I’m considering contacting a tailor or someone if the return thing falls through, maybe they could, I dunno, modify the thing so that it’s functional. T’is a sad day for costumes today.