Who is stealing my socks?

Is there a ghost or goblin that trolls washing machines in search of socks? Not so much socks, plural, but sock as in singular.

I’m convinced there is. And I’d be willing to go on a limb here and suggest that no matter where you live, no matter who does your washing, no matter how careful you are, this sock goblin has visited your washing machine on more than one occasion.

How often have you done your laundry and ended up with a single sock?

I am starting to get alarmed that I might be haunted by this demon?

I wouldn’t trust anybody now with my socks. Unless these casual cleaners have security clearance from the Pentagon or bonded by Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I wouldn’t trust them

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Regularly, these past few weeks, a pair ends up as a single.

It’s done surreptitiously, you see, sometime between the time the door is closed and the machine is programmed and when the alarm goes off to inform you the load is done.

Socks go missing. Like, all the time.

I am almost at the stage where I am preparing a missing poster replete with a photograph of the remaining sock, and putting it up on lamp posts, community centres and at local stores.

I’ll rip down the ones for Missing Fluffy who wandered off three weeks ago – cats do that you know – or for cleaners offering their services and do things like laundry and ironing.

I wouldn’t trust anybody now with my socks. Unless these casual cleaners have security clearance from the Pentagon or bonded by Her Majesty’s Secret Service, I wouldn’t trust them.

Socks don’t just walk away on their own, you know.

I am convinced that there is a huge black market out there from pirated socks. I can tell you without a word of a lie that right now, I am missing – doh! – a Homer Simpson sock. I can’t walk around wearing just one Homer, can I?

I’m also missing a plain black sock. And a white one too.

Stealing my socks

Who would want to steal socks. I have heard regularly of underwear and other ladies’ garments being stolen from washing lines. Washing lines?

My pairs don’t make it as far as the washing line and it’s there, usually with peg in hand, that I realise that I’ve been burgled, the victim of theft, robbed of my sock in broad daylight.

I know one man who believes he has a solution to this sock-theft ring. When he does his laundry, he uses a clothes peg to keep the pair of socks together in the washing machine in a desperate attempt to foil this sure-footed thief or sock goblin.

And here, now, to you, I will admit I have tried this technique, pegging to socks together as I place them in the machine.

Sadly, this failed. I was left with one peg and one sock – the other vanished between wash, rinse and spin cycles.

Socks are not sentimental objects for me. I don’t horde them. I simply wear them, most of the time, when I’m not in a warm climate and wearing flipflops. But when you’re left with diminishing supply and only singular socks, it does get very frustrating.

This theft ring has left me now at the stage where I count my socks as I place them in the washing machine. It’s a matter of sanity. One pair, two pairs, three pairs, four pairs.

Eight socks in all. Yes, and I count them again to make sure. Yes, eight socks. Shut the washing machine door, put in the powder and lavender-scented fabric softener that keeps your colours bright like new.

And then the machine does its thing, rumbles and tumbles. But when you open the door, you end up with three pairs and a single. Daylight robbery, it is. Aghhhhhh!