Financial disaster looms over six inches of cloth

There’s a huge financial crisis coming and you’ll want to take steps immediately to protect yourself from the fallout. We’re talking gigantic, unstoppable, a veritable tsunami of lost wealth and shattered dreams.

It could have been prevented, of course, but woulda and coulda and shoulda are the Three Stooges of the apocalypse. They had their chance, they stepped aside, and now the whirlwind is upon us.

I discovered the impending disaster when I started going out with friends more, recognized that I have no presentable clothing left in the closet, and decided to buy a gray dress shirt. I never anticipated the dark web of financial chicanery that I would uncover, or how widespread the terror would become.

First, I went to a couple of actual clothing stores, and I thought my request was pretty simple. 16/32-33, dress shirt, point collar. How hard could it be?

Impossible, as it turns out. As I raced from store to store, I found places with gray shirts that weren’t my size, shirts in my size that aren’t gray, shirts with spread collars or two-toned collars or French cuffs or 35” sleeves that need to be altered at a “slight” added cost. Then I searched online and encountered the same issue, with the same white or black or taupe shirt available on 400 sites and my shirt on none of them.

And that’s when I discovered the unfolding crisis.  Almost none of the dress shirts have pockets anymore, and now all of us are at risk of financial ruin. Join us as we slide down the slippery slope…

All the great founders are dying or retiring and the conglomerates that run fashion houses today are driven by bean counters, not designers. Someone figured out they could save 14 cents per shirt by eliminating the pocket and that was that. Dress shirts today, casual shirts tomorrow, and then, le deluge.

Already, more than 18,900 pocket seamstresses—and seamsters—have been tossed on the street in Indonesia alone, plus similar numbers in Vietnam and Bangladesh, and they’ve started an underground movement to unseat their governments. If things go as planned, the Pie Day Revolution on March 14 will make this year’s supply chain disruptions look like a birthday party.

Before that tidal wave swamps American business, though, our domestic economy will be crippled. No pockets mean no pocket protectors, and every tech nerd in every IT department in the country will be afraid to walk out of the house without protected pockets. That means we’ll all be on hold an extra 27 hours when the internet goes down…which it will…and GDP will slide 8% due to the lost productivity.

Sales of pens and mechanical pencils will plummet, forcing the closure of seven Bic plants and every Office Max in 11 states. Emergency rooms will be inundated as men stab themselves in the chest with pens that once slid painlessly into their shirt pockets.

Apple will collapse as millions absentmindedly drop their IPhones into pockets that no longer exist, leading to a shortage of replacement phones that cannot be resolved by shipments from all those countries under siege from unemployed pocket seamstresses. Insurance companies that provided loss and damage coverage for those phones will dissolve into bankruptcy, which will prove to be the tipping point for the entire insurance industry.

E-commerce will dry up as millennials and Gen Z wander aimlessly, unable to make purchases without their phones. Uber and Lyft will fold in a world without phones to show their customers’ locations. Crime will soar as roving bands of robbers search out anyone who still has a working IPhone.

And all of this will happen because some financial geek at a clothing company decided it was a good idea to save 14 cents by getting rid of shirt pockets…and then bragged to all his other financial geek friends about what a genius he is. Well, congratulations, jerkface, you’ve ruined everything for everyone.

Sadly, there’s nothing left for the rest of us to do but stock up on beef jerky, gather in bunkers with our loved ones, and await the end of the world. It was so nice while it lasted.

There’s not much point in clicking here to subscribe to Dad Writes, since the internet is going down and there won’t be any tech support to restore it.

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