An unsatisfying resolution

[simont]

I've not been posting here in a while, and it seems to me that one reason why not is that I increasingly don't feel as if I have the brain-space to put together a long and well thought-out post about anything.

Perhaps, therefore, I should begin to fix this by posting short and/or inconsequential things. To kick off with, here's one that is both.

I lost a sock the other week. I did it in the way you normally lose socks: at one time I had N socks, and at a time considerably later I had N-1, and there were a lot of things that happened in between, so I don't know which was responsible.

(That's what makes the sock lost, of course – if I could narrow down to one event, I could have just gone and got the sock back from wherever that one happened.)

I looked for it everywhere, and it didn't turn up. I resigned myself to having only N-1 of those socks – until I did the laundry yesterday, and found that when I came to hang everything up, I inexplicably had N of them again.

So I found the sock in the same way as I lost it: I don't know what thing I did caused it to reappear.

That's the worst way to find a sock. The problem is solved, but in a way that sheds no light on the mystery! Arrrgh!

Comments

[simont]

Oh yes, for normal socks I certainly couldn't tell. My usual scheme is to buy in bulk, gradually throw socks away one by one as they become too worn out and holey to wear, and when it's starting to look as if I've only just got enough left to get between laundry days, buy more. (And to buy them all identical, avoiding the need to tediously pair things up.)

[jack]

I was going to suggest exactly this, but it seems like you're ahead of me.

I'll also add, at some point I invented a category for "hard to figure out but not very illuminating when you" for things like "maybe it was caught inside the washing machine, or in a pillow case, or left behind in the laundry basket, and if you'd searched thoroughly you would have found it, but it's too much work to do so," and have been more relaxed that I don't have to understand *every* puzzle.