The socks and towels conundrum

Here is a problem of which I am hardly the first to bring it up: how come socks always go missing? At times I even had a total of 6 different widowed socks that became useless by the disappearance of their significant others. To prevent their depression I attempted to do some mix-and-matching, but luckily for them, as well as for my fashion sense, lost partners have reappeared as mysteriously as their dispersal. However, my accounting of my sock stocks has never been very rigorous and I can't help to have the feeling that some have never made it back and that eventually even whole pairs have gone missing.

Like I said before, this seems to be a global problem, as shown by results of the research performed by the Bureau of Missing Socks. Many theories have been constructed to explain this phenomenon, from Brazil to leprechauns to terrorists, but I prefer a more modern scientific approach. Whatever may be the true reason, I cannot help but to see the correlation with another statistic I encountered while going through all my stuff: the surprising amount of towels I appear to own. As far as I can remember they always fit in a single drawer of my dresser, but at the moment they also occupy space originally reserved for T-Shirts. The amount of beach towels in all different colors is astounding, even when taking into account that my number of visits to sunny beaches has been higher than ever the last 18 months. However, next to this, the majority of the towel population still consists of regular towels, some of which bear labels of fabric suppliers that I have never heard of, let alone have visited. Some of them that I thought were unique suddenly turn out to have twins and of at least one I know it was destined to dry the back of somebody else. And I'm not even mentioning the kitchen towels..

So in my case I can only come to a single conclusion: somewhere in the wear-wash-dry-store cycle my socks are transformed into towels. Luckily for me and others with a working olfactory system this seems to happen in a part of the cycle where foot odor is neutralized. Still, my need for socks is greater than that for towels, so it may be time to find a way to put an end to this madness. In the meantime: anybody need a towel?