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

[mtbc]

I have a similar approach to e-mail, not in regard to losing them, but in the perfect being the enemy of the good: if I waited until I felt able to put together a decent reply then I'd rarely write anything. Ironically, the messages whose responses are the most important to me have to wait longer for me to write those responses, because at any specific time I am less likely to feel up to making them sufficiently good.

I didn't lose socks, even in communal college laundry, until I allowed others to become involved in doing my laundry. Where the lost socks went, I've no idea, especially given the large quantity that vanished. Now I've taken over my own laundry again; I've been drying some socks tonight. Unfortunately things are no longer in a sufficiently regular state that I can easily judge if normality has thus returned.

While I don't want to patronize you: you did check that the missing sock wasn't stuck to the top of the washing machine drum when damp after rinsing?

We have the added complication that our cat Pippin likes to ferret (or, er, cat) around in our clothing and pull things out and move them around. He'll find adult-sized pyjama trousers in the bedroom and drag them downstairs. I don't think he has a special hidden sock pile though.

[simont]

Between me knowing I had the sock and knowing I'd lost the sock I didn't actually do any laundry (because no weekend intervened), so yes, I'm pretty sure that isn't how it got lost.