The Missing Sock Basket

Everyone knows socks go AWOL; where, exactly, they go between washer and dryer is one of the Great Mysteries of Life, alongside what happens when we die and why what other people order at restaurants always looks better than what's on your own plate, nevermind that you don't like and won't eat what they ordered, it's still looks more appealing, which is the mystery part.  Anyway.  Socks go missing; this is a fact.  Where or why is not ours to question.  The problem is, what do you do with the good, reliable, conscientious sock who reports to duty while you wait for the slacker sock to show up?

Some time ago, I developed the habit of tossing my unmatched socks into a basket, the idea being that eventually the erstwhile partner will be tossed into the same basket and the two will be paired up when I conduct my Sock Audit, in theory once a month.  By and large, the system works well enough, although I've never been able to match all the socks up at any given time, and have come to suspect that some of the sock-basket socks have been, alas, permanently abandoned.  Still, it takes a lot for me to toss out the surviving sock; it almost seems a little cruel, not to mention unjust.  Who really deserves my wrath is the sock that went missing in the first place.  But I digress.

Earlier this week I sat down with Snapdragon and together we matched up socks for the first time since September. I figured it was time since we kept running out of socks, but there were never many socks in the hampers.  Indeed, the missing sock basket had become a de facto hamper, housing an enormous pile of clean socks.  It took an hour to sort through them all, but by the time I was done, I'd successfully matched up thirty-eight pairs of socks, and got to cross yet another thing off my put-off list.

 

 

Auditing the Missing Sock Basket