that's going to be a specialized repair

[cellio]

When I did laundry a few days ago, I found a sock in the dryer that belongs to neither of us. I'm going to assume that no one broke into our house to do laundry, so that points strongly to another theory.

For the longest time I assumed that dryers ate socks (and sometimes expelled them as lint). But no! My dryer is apparently a sock transporter! But if so, the balance is way out of whack; I've lost many socks, but I believe this is the first deposit.

What kind of a repairman fixes that?

Comments

[grouchyoldcoot.livejournal.com]

Oh, this is a known phenomenon well modeled by my theory of quantum undodynamics. In some other drier of approximately the same shape and angular velocity a pair of underpants made an undospin transition to the sock state, giving it enough energy to tunnel to your drier. The sock tunneling rate depends on several drier-specific parameters and the Sock Tunneling Constant, a fundamental constant of the theory. You see it most often in laundromats, where you get a lot of driers of identical design lined up in a row to make a periodic square well potential.

[cellio]

Is there any conclusive research yet on factors most likely to cause underpants to make this transition? (Boxers vs briefs? Color? Age?) Is there corelation between those factors and the quality of socks that result? Or, put another way, can a sufficiently-desperate person take his worn-out undies to a laundromat to make new socks?

[grouchyoldcoot.livejournal.com]

So far as I know, there is no known way to influence the detailed state of the socks, even at the level of plain vs. argyle. This is an active area of research at several high energy washing facilities at CERW in Europe.