trouser conundrum

My work requires that I dress in a suit.

I actually own two suits. Both are pretty cheap affairs and both are black - they're actually the same suit in the sense that I bought two sets of the same suit at the same time. So of course, both are the same size.

Except they aren't. They both have the same size labels in them, but one pair the trousers are ever so slightly smaller than the others.

The difference has to be really quite small - visually you can't see a difference, so they can't be, like, 2 inches different or something like that. No, this is more in the realms of manufacturing tolerance.

Manufacturing tolerance is that tiny little difference you get between products that have rolled off of some sort of assembly line. Mass production is probably the most important advance in terms of the functioning of modern society, and the idea behind it is that every single thing that rolls off the line is identical.

It's the source of the idea that if you go down a shop and buy a particularly screw that is labelled as being 1 inch long then that screw will be one inch long. And all the other screws in the bag will be 1 inch long as well.

In the mists of time, this wasn't' the case - you'd drill your hole and have to make your screw fit based on the individual hole (well, you probably wouldn't be using screws, but you get the idea). Anyway, the point is that manufacturing tolerance is the margin of error that's allowed before that 1 inch screw stops being a 1 inch screw.

In some cases - like with screws - the tolerance can be tiny. Often things with those sorts of tolerances are entirely produced by machines, so you can see why the variation would be so small.

In the case of my trews they've probably be produced by some Chinese Sweatshop by a small child and he'll have flubbed the exact position of clasp or something. Probably as a result of the beating his supervisor gave him for making too many mistakes.

I'm kidding of course. I'm guessing the supervisor has probably been replaced by a machine - far more efficient.

Anyway, the point is that the trews I am currently sporting are ever so slightly tighter than the other pair of trews I own. This has the weird effect of making me think I'm either gaining or loosing weight each week.

Now this isn't because of the obvious, I know the trews are differently sized. The reason is because when ~I put the other pair on, the difference is greater than I remembered. So, when I put these on, I knew they would be tighter, but the extent of that tightness was more than I was expecting, so I thought I must have put on weight.

The reverse will happen next week - I'll put the looser pair on and be surprised at just how loose they are and think my efforts to combat the tightness experienced this week had more effect that I thought.

How's that for self-delusion?