Last night my husband asked if I was missing a sock – as he had found one on the floor.  That brought a very interesting question to my mind:  Is everybody missing a sock?

3529sockEven when you find a sock, you are missing a sock.

Follow me here:  A found sock does not mean it has been found, it means you are missing one more.  If you haven’t found a sock but have a spare, you are missing a sock, and if you do not have any unmatched pairs, there is every likelihood you are missing TWO socks!sock-ins

Think about that.  Unless every pair of socks you own is different how would you know if you were missing a pair unless you count them? Unless you are some OCD person like my husband (used to be) with a detailed specific place for each article of clothing, you’ve most likely lost a sock at one point in time or another.

Then there’s that age-old question;
“Where did that missing sock go?”

There are all sorts of theories.  From the mundane, ‘lost in transit’ to the outlandish, ‘black hole in the dryer’ but the fact of the matter is, EVERYONE LOSES A SOCK!

I’ve found other people’s socks on the side of the road, in thrift shops, even in doggy toys (many of those socks were my own) but not everyone has a dog (poor people), but I digress.

red_sockWere the found socks rejects from the alien spaceship beaming them up at night to run probing tests on them and discovering they had two of the same so they had to reject one?  And will the other ever be found?  What if we started a sock lost and found, would there always be unmatched pairs or would there ever, one day, be a second that will show up?thCANZ7ZUV

Of course kids these days have figured out how to get around that problem… they wear unmatched socks as fashion, but us older ‘kids’ in more professional circles can’t get away with that solution.  An older guy wearing one navy blue sock and one brown sock may be able to get away with it because of how closely they come to color… and then he is given a little leeway because of eye sight, but not all of us get that excuse to fall back on.

So how many of us have a sock drawer full of spares awaiting the day that the match shows up?  How many of us check those spares whenever another single arrive? And how many of us knew something was missing before a spare is found and how would we know it was found if we didn’t know it was missing in the first place?

Oh that dreaded single sock, why do you haunt us?

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