Hats

I'm looking for a hat, black, gambler style. Looked at Steampunk Emporium; the one I want is out of stock and they're not sure when it will be back in stock ("varies between a few weeks and a few months"). Ordered one from Hats.com on Sunday, with standard ground shipping; it arrived on Tuesday. Unfortunately, in this case, an XL is a bit too large, and the size L is out of stock as well ("could take up to three months") . I looked at a couple of other websites, but the right size / color / style combination is out of stock everywhere I looked.

Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is conspiracy. I set my world-renowed research and espionage organization to investigating. Whispers were exchanged in the back alleys of Bangkok, cryptic scraps of paper were silently passed from hand to hand in Angola, and a tattooed snake was examined in Iceland. My agents discovered that the entire world's production of gambler hats (black, size L) comes from Road Xing, a village in southwestern China; they are the work of a sixty-seven year old man whose name is either Four Lucky Dragon or Grumpy Venerable Hatmaker (China has two different writing systems and I'm not clear which one my spies were using). Mr. Four has been off visiting his sister and admiring his new grandnephew since October, and his apprentices are reluctant to do anything more than apply the bands to hats which Mr. Four has already blocked. And they finished that up in November. So, no new hats until Mr Grumpy finishes recuperating from Chinese New Year, goes home, and gets back to work. Plus time for shipping via yak to Nepal, bicycle cart to Bombay, and steamer across the Pacific.

[ edit: happy ending ]

afterthought: I should mention that I'm not ranting at Steampunk Emporium or Hats.com ; they both replied to emails in a timely manner and neither of them said "give us money now and we'll ship your item eventually". Sometimes you're just out of stock and that's the way it is. I myself once had a situation:

Customer: I need some Vespel (a high grade industrial plastic) , this size, that grade, in about three weeks.

Me: We're out of stock, and due to circumstances at the resin maker, that has a forty-six week lead time.

Customer: Okay, so about the middle of next month, I can live wi--.

Me: No, not "four weeks to six weeks". Forty-six weeks. End of October.