The Mythical Lost Sock

Missing and losing socks is a recurring event for most people who do their own laundry. Just where are these matching socks going? It’s the punch line of many jokes and the subject of philosophical musings for annoyed laundry doers. Though there isn’t anything supernatural or mythical about the location of lost socks besides one footed socks trolls, we figured we might be able to help.

Doing the laundry is in the long lists of chores that every person who lives and wears clothes has to do. Like many chores, not much thought is put into the doing the task at hand. This is where the mythical lost sock strikes and becomes supposedly lost forever. One could say it slips through the cracks. Clothes of varying sizes pile upon one another on the floors, hampers, and of course thrown behind the bedroom door. During transit is usually a time when a lot of these socks become lost. Many times they will slip into pant legs or get mixed in with pillow covers. This is only the beginning. Just getting to the washer and dryer is half the battle. During the cleaning and folding is where the trouble really begins. More of then not, you don’t have a lost sock, but you may have two single socks that never made it back to each other. You see, it’s more of a perception issue.

The main problem arises when looking through a laundry basket for a pair of matching socks. This is where the trouble rears its head and people realize they have a missing sock problem. Most of the time they’ll settle for a pair that are almost alike, but not quite. This is the start of a viscous cycle. Two socks that would have been paired eventually, end up going home with good enough driving us all nuts at 8 am in the morning.

A few simple ways to keep up on sock accounting skills and make sure a sock never disappears again. The first step is not throwing socks into a large pile of clothes and forgetting about it later. What can be done is to wash all the socks at once. If this sounds too tedious then make sure to keep track of all socks in the load and put them in the dryer and baskets right after washing. Using a laundry bag with a net will help by avoiding the pitfalls of a hamper that has openings in it. Pairing like socks together and washing them at the same time will be the complete overall fix for this problem as well. Even with all of these preemptive steps taken, there are still possibilities that those some socks will be lost from simple human error. The best plan of action to be taken is to put those lone socks in their own drawer and wait until their other half is found. Unless the sock monsters are real.

Hope this helped make your life a bit easier. For more tips on how to save time, check out Tile, a tiny tracking device for lost items, that helps most people save 10 minutes a day. Or, you can always grab a 12 pack and place a Tile on each sock!

-Mike