We’ve all had this occur multiple times in our lives: we do the laundry, one sock from the pair goes missing. We check the washer and the dryer, it’s nowhere to be found. It happens often enough to be a running cultural, universal joke. But it makes no sense. How does it happen?
In: Planetary Science
Usually, when this happens, the sock clung to something else in the load, like a shirt or hoodie. Sometimes, I just didn’t check the washer well enough and the wet sock is stuck to the inside.
They slip through the rubber gasket between the machine’s spinning drum and the [outer case.](https://media-cldnry.s-nbcnews.com/image/upload/t_social_share_1024x768_scale,f_auto,q_auto:best/newscms/2018_18/1336716/socks.jpg)
I’ve had it happen before where it ends up inside a duvet cover and I only notice it months later. PS hi to future Reddit sluths that try to profile me based on my comment history.
I’m on holiday in Thailand and dropped off some laundry at one of those 100THB per kg places. I got back all my clothing plus 1 pair of women’s socks and a single black mens socks. So that’s where they go lol.
I often find an unpaired sock stuck in a t-shirt sleeve or caught up in a fitted sheet after the tumble dry. I feel like static electricity increases likelihood of this happening
One. It’s always just one of each pair. I’ve had three or more pairs go in and one of each come out.
I think it is often that you just didn’t put it in the washer to begin with, but the first time you notice is when you go to fold your laundry and “lost in the dryer” is just a false attribution or euphemism for “how is it possible that one sock made it from hamper to folding and the other did not”.
I have voiced this theory before. It is the **Sock Pixies**. Now hear me out…
Back in the before times, most socks were plain cotton. The Sock Pixies would steal a pair at a time so you would likely not notice and they are good eating. But with the advancement of polymers and plastics getting into everything, now the Sock Pixies have microplastics in the brain and it has sent them wrong, and more than a little bit spiteful.
If they come to your house and find a cotton/polymer blend, they will become enraged, and use their Pixie magic to transform ONE sock into a Tupperware lid that doesn’t fit any of your containers, then slip it into your collection. They then run off cackling into the night.
Allow my five year old kid to illustrate: After he takes a sock off, he throws it. Usually one goes someplace obvious like near the laundry hamper or on the couch or in the middle of the floor. The second sock gets thrown somewhere else entirely like behind the tv, under the fridge, or somehow travels through a vent into the attic I guess. If I’m there to witness it the sock pair is salvageable. If I’m not there and there are no witnesses, one sock is lost forever and one sock becomes an orphan that travels to the wash, is cleaned and dried and tossed in the bag of orphan socks in the closet, where it will spend its days waiting to be outgrown and tossed in the trash.
They have all been eaten by the fitted sheets. These exist in an extra dimension, as proven by the impossibility of folding them in 3D space. So your socks are lost forever.
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