Green Socks

I just spent the last moments of the weekend organizing my sock drawer. It was fascinating, seriously. I feel as though I solved a thirty-year-old mystery. You know how you always lose a sock or two during the laundry ritual? Where do all those socks go you keep wondering? Tonight I figured it out.

C. Jeanne Heida at associatedcontent.com sheds some light on the top places missing socks tend to go. She says to try checking your agitator. “When I donated an old washing machine several years ago, I pried up the agitator and found nearly twenty missing socks.” Apparently there is a gap in the washing machine where socks can easily slip through. Fascinating.

“The other place socks tend to go,” she says, ‘is hidden or stuck to other pieces of clothing,” which makes great sense. She adds that socks aren’t alone in finding themselves missing in action during the laundry process. “Underwear is particularly fond of turning up in places where it shouldn’t be.” I hear that all the time at home!

The subject continued to fascinate me so I continued researching other articles, long articles – about missing socks! The funny had now become absurd. The coolest piece I read was Brian J. Reardon at laundry-alternative.com with his Fate of Missing Socks - Laundry: A Quantum Mechanical Approach. Intrigued I had to read on to find out that the first modern theory to explain typical laundry questions like the missing sock query, was the Decay Theory that states; the quantity of socks in a load can be expressed as a decreasing exponential function of time which is analogous to radioactive decay. Of course, duh!

Nt+N0*exp(-pt)



Reardon points out however, “according to this theory, socks should never completely disappear, or, more importantly, reappear. This clearly contradicts every day experience.”

My weekly laundry experience showed me that when I found a solo sock at the end of folding I would throw it in my sock drawer. Well tonight, that’s exactly where I found them all, every last solo sock found its’ mate tonight in the bottom of the sock drawer. Mystery solved. All except two different green socks, independent stragglers losing their mates after the St. Patrick’s parade but their match may be in the laundry as we speak, or stuck to someone’s kilt drenched in green beer at the Blarney Stone.

Happy St. Patrick’s Day!!

© Chico Daily 2008