Lost Socks

I enjoy doing laundry. I find the exercise rather calming. I started doing my own laundry back when I went off to University at the age of 17 years and 9 months. We had washers and dryers, in the basement of our building, that required payment. To minimize the cost of doing laundry I would wait till all my clothing was dirty. This system I devised was simple enough that I've never needed a revision. Something else that has stuck with me from the start is my ability to lose a sock every other time I do laundry. I was wondering the other day how many socks I had indeed lost since I began doing laundry.

As previously mentioned I started doing laundry at the age of 17 years and 9 months and I am currently 23 years and 3 months old. The elapsed time I've been doing laundry is 5 years and 6 months, in weeks this would be 286.

How often have I been doing laundry? This is season dependent, I have a collection of sweaters that are not worn during the summer months. I would guess that the maximum amount of time between doing laundry is 2 weeks during the summer and 4 weeks during the winter. For the ease of argument let us say that I do laundry every 3 weeks.

With the elapsed time of 286 weeks and the averaged time between laundry at 3 weeks I've done laundry roughly 95 times.

I do lose socks at what I feel is an extraordinary rate of once every two times doing laundry. Since socks are usually found in pairs it makes sense to count them as such. Rephrasing my statement to include pairs of socks; I lose a pair of socks every four times doing laundry.

Having done laundry 95 times over the course of my life I've lost roughly 24 pairs of socks. Or about 4 pairs of socks a year.