[wolf]

There is this coat that I have been trying to order since last December from LL Bean.

To date, I have placed four separate orders for it.

When you order from the LL Bean website, you can only place orders for in stock items. Anything else gets deleted from the available colors and sizes for the item.

The first three times I placed the order, about two weeks after the order was entered, I got one of those not-envelopes with the tear off edges advising me that they were "unexpectedly" out of stock on the item, but I was on backorder.

A month or so after that would see the arrival of a post card apologizing for their inability to acquire any more of the item in questions, would you possibly change your mind about wanting it in colonial red, and try the blaze orange version?

No, I don't think so.

On one of the iterations they apparently tried to contact me by phone, but since I won't answer overseas phone calls when I'm not expecting one, and they didn't bother to leave a voicemail, I didn't learn ahead of time that they were once again failing to ship me my jacket.

Because I got my monthly "we have cool things for you to buy" email, I was poking around at some specials on their website, and figured I'd give the jacket another try.

I placed the order for the fourth time.

Much to my surprise, I got an email from LL Bean over the weekend.

It told me that my jacket had been shipped.

Having learned from my previous experiences, I wasn't really ready to count my multilayer system jacket rated to 30 degrees below zero before it hatched from that FEDEX truck, let me tell you.

It came yesterday.

It almost fit, and looked like hell on me.