A few years ago, I bought a good leather jacket while on a business trip to Wisconsin. The jacket was cheap, but seemed of good quality–and that has borne out to be true. Good material, rugged, warm, comfortable, and (not that I know anything about fashion) it looked good, at least to me.

At the end of last Spring, I found the one part of the jacket that reflected its price. On the zipper, there is a small, flat metal tab on the fastening mechanism that you pull up and down to open or close the zipper. You know, the little metal flap that you hold between your thumb and forefinger while zipping. That thing broke, snapped in the middle, making it impossible to pull the fastener up or down.

Not a problem, I thought. It’s, what, a simple piece of metal, gotta cost five cents tops to produce. I examined the remaining stump, and with a little twisting, it came right off. Replacing it should be a cinch–get a new metal tab, twist it a bit to snap it on, and Bob’s your uncle. So I went to this large sewing and clothing supply store in Shinjuku I know of, figuring they must have a small rack of these things. Would cost a dollar at most, including a significant markup for the store.

I go in, wait for a salesperson to be free, and asked about it. Go to the sixth floor, she told me. I went to the elevator, which had left the first floor just before I had gotten to it, stopping at every floor on the way up, and on the way down. Sensing one of those frustrating series of piddling annoyances, I speculated that I would be told on the sixth (and top) floor that what I need is actually on the first floor. That happens often enough.

I get to the sixth floor, but don’t see the right materials. So I wait to talk to someone, and am redirected again–twice. When I finally reach someone who deals with these things, she looks at the broken fastener tab with doubt, then goes to the back of the store for a few minutes. When she comes back out, she’s carrying zippers and fasteners. “It’s not YKK, is it?” she observes. YKK is a Japanese company which makes something like 90% of all the zippers in the world. I know because I visited their factory once years and years ago, I forget even why.

The salesperson meticulously compares the zippers that she brought out with mine, attempting to divine their size, mumbling in apparently distress about this non-YKK zipper I’ve got. I try to tell her, I don’t need the fastening mechanism, it’s not broken. I just need a new tab. See? Simple little thing. You must have some. She tried to explain that they don’t sell them. Why not, I wondered–it must be the most breakable part of most zippers, it’s simple, it should be cheap. (Though maybe that’s why they don’t carry them.)

She got that face that shopkeepers get in Japan when you ask for something they don’t have, and they don’t want to disappoint you, yet they know they have little other choice. Here we go, I thought. She’s gonna send me to the first floor for something.

She outdid my expectations. “I can’t tell if the size is right,” she told me. “You’ll have to go to the repair corner. Go down to the first floor, go across the street, and up to the fifth floor.” Great. She found a way to make me go even farther–no doubt to be redirected back again.

So off I went, and sure enough, the elevator down had just left the floor, and was stopping at, well, you know. I walked down the stairs, crossed the street, and got to the elevator just as it had taken off from the first floor. Sometimes you can’t catch a break.

When I got to the fifth floor, naturally I got redirected after waiting yet again, and found the right person. “It’s not a YKK zipper, is it? she mused. “No,” I replied, “but I don’t need the zipper, I just need that little tab. Surely you must have one.”

“No,” she said, “you can’t replace that part.” This is where my BS sensors started going off. It’s a small piece of metal. The operative part is a simple straight bar divided in the middle to allow the piece to be worked into place on assembly. If it’s not available, it must be by choice, not because of a mechanical impossibility. It would be child’s play to replace, you don’t need to be an engineer to figure that out.

Further, she opined that my zipper, being of the non-YKK variety, was probably not going to work with any of their fasteners. “We’ll have to take out the whole zipper and replace it with a new one.” I asked her the cost, and it approached the cost of the original jacket. This is most definitely not right, I knew it.

At that point, I was hit with an inspiration. “Wait, I bet I could use a key ring in there. Just thread it through and use that. It wouldn’t be very stylish–or maybe it would be, I don’t know–but I bet it would work.”

She shook her head sagely, telling me with absolute confidence that it would never work. There’s a locking mechanism in the fastener, she told me; “if the pulling tab isn’t just right, the fastener will lock up. It’ll never work.” Still, I wasn’t about to leave my jacket there for a week or two while they massively overcharged me for unnecessary work–well, not without looking into things first–so I left.

On my way out (the elevator was there for once), I grumbled to myself that the whole thing was ridiculous, I should have been able to snap on an extra part in ten seconds and walked away. Once on the street, I decided to trust my instincts. I fished out my keys, found a key ring which was about the right size and thickness, and rearranged the keys to free up the ring. I then threaded it through the hole in the fastener on the jacket’s zipper.

It works perfectly.

I felt kind of foolish for not thinking of it way earlier, and for not trusting my instincts immediately. After all, sometimes you know it’s just gotta be a scam.