How Many Socks is Too Many Socks?

Its only in the last few months that I've allowed myself a luxury I never had before - giving all my laundry to the dry cleaners to do. I estimate that I end up paying a premium of about $30 extra per month in order to not have to do it myself. Is that worth it? Depends on how you look at it. Do I want to sit for a few hours at some random steamy laundromat (especially with the summer coming up), making sure that no one reaches into the machine to touch my unmentionables? Not really. Do I like spending more money? No. So it's kind of a little bit of a dilemma, especially when you consider that you probably care more about your own clothes than some random person.

So fine, I guess at some point the whole time thing really got to me - faced with the prospect of having to do laundry that week, I'd keep putting it off indefinitely because I just couldn't/didn't want to find the time needed to do it. That's like with me and cleaning. Sometimes it all just seems so exhausting and time consuming that I'd rather not do it at all. Now it's the little dry cleaning place around the corner that is the lucky recipient of my business. As a cash-only establishment, I get a little bit of a headache everytime I need to dig into my pocket for $25, but whatever, in healthy relationships everyone has their quirks.

Except that recently, I've found that my dry cleaner's quirks have extended to losing my socks. When I used to do my own laundry, this was a rare occurrence. I know everyone always seems to have issues with the aliens that come down while you're not looking and whisk away single socks, leaving you with sad, unpaired and useless slivers of fabric, but this didn't really happen to me. Maybe I was lucky, maybe I have a knack for spotting loose clothing and reuniting it with its other half. Whatever it was, I didn't have to go to Costco to purchase the sox six-pack to compensate for the lost footwear.

Now, in the last 2-3 months, I've found myself with SEVEN unpaired socks. Luckily they tend to be the cheaper, plain black or white socks, but still. SEVEN. How do you lose so many socks? And is this too much? I feel like it is. I get that, maybe, every month or so, they lose a sock. But this is at the point where they've now lost multiple socks in single loads. Yesterday I come in to get my laundry again, and the woman who runs the place - who at this point is holding onto my loose socks in the event that, miraculously, she should somehow find a matching sock somewhere - tells me "oh, so we were able to match a pair because we found a loose sock in the load you dropped off."

And I was like, "um, no. There weren't any loose pairs in that load. I don't randomly throw in a single sock for you to wash."

She didn't really understand what I was saying I don't think, because she kept repeating herself, as if expecting me to be really appreciative when, really, what it came down to was that they managed to lose another sock that matched with a sock they had already lost. Perfect.

Ugh, it could be as simple as going somewhere else, but I feel like maybe this is a problem with all dry cleaning places that wash your clothes for you? Really, they otherwise do a fine job and they're by far the cheapest and closest option, so maybe I don't have such a bad thing going? I don't know, I'm torn. And there's also a part of me that has a sneaking suspicion that they don't really add bleach when I ask them to. Maybe I'm just being paranoid about that.