Mismatched Socks

For years I had a large drawer full of socks.    None of them ever seemed to match.     Every morning I would get up and hold some socks up to the morning light to try to find two that looked close.    Oftentimes I miscalculated.    Dark blue and black can look very similar in the dim light of  5:30 AM.   A few years ago I decided to try to match up all my random socks.    When my then girlfriend came down to my condo that evening, I had 100 or more individual socks draped over every available surface in my den in the midst of a heroic effort to match up my socks once and for all.    I had found about 50 pairs by the time she showed up and had just about given up trying to find any more matches.    She sat down and with her keen mother's eye eventually found 25 more pairs.    That still left approximately 50 or 60 apparently unique, stand-alone socks.    I found an empty drawer for those, why I don't know.   The reason I had so many socks is that I would get frustrated from time to time and just go out and buy a few more pairs.    I think that washing machines must eat socks or something.   

A couple of years later I finally hit upon the grand solution.   Safety pins!    I pinned together a few pairs and put them in one of the condo washing machines as a test.    The socks got washed just fine and the washing machine didn't come to a grinding halt mid-cycle.   So I decided to safety pin a batch of socks and wash them that way.    Same result.   My theory worked.   Now all I needed was more safety pins.    I did a one click order on Amazon.com and the next day, voila, the big brown truck brought me six-dozen safety pins.    My office manager still remarks about her bachelor boss ordering a box of safety pins from Amazon.com.    How was I supposed to know where to buy safety pins?

In any event, my new pinning program has been a great success.    The only time that socks are not pinned is when they are on my feet.    When I take them off at night, I take a safety pin out of a little bowl on my night stand and pin them back up and toss them into the bin.    My son made my little bowl in ceramics class when he as 7.    Very useful present.    In the past five years, I have never once had to try to match up random socks.   No more early morning squinting into the rising sun.

I have not patented my pinning program.    So all of my faithful (male) blog readers are free to adopt it for their own use.   Somehow I never heard of females having the sock problem.   So enjoy.