My daughter Edie was helping me with laundry a couple of weeks ago and, after doing some sorting and folding, she had a lone sock. Lone socks happen to be a peeve of mine. Not the socks themselves, or even their lonely status, but the tendency of some people to say something along the lines of, "Oh no. One of my socks mysteriously vanished." Clearly, socks don't mysteriously vanish. They go somewhere. And to claim otherwise is to abdicate one's responsibility to reason and analysis.
So Edie and I identified at least 7 ways one can lose a sock in the laundering process.
- The wearer initially wore mis-matched socks, or perhaps even threw the matching sock out.
- The sock never made it into the hamper.
- The sock never made it into the washer.
- The sock never made it out of the washer (stuck to the side, sucked through the drain).
- The sock never made it into the dryer (fell behind the washer, got accidentally mixed with other laundry).
- The sock never made it out of the dryer.
- The sock wound up inside another item of laundry.
I work for a company that hopes someday to save the underbanked billions of dollars by providing installment loans at a fraction of the cost of payday loans (which are often their only credit option). Today at work one of the new employees asked me what I do. I told them about the socks. Then I said that there are several possible ways that we can make a mistake when taking a loan payment. My job is to identify when there has been a failure (a missing sock), figure out why it happened (the sock was in the duvet cover), make the customer whole (retrieve the sock), and then figure out how we can improve our processes to prevent a recurrence of the problem (always check the duvet cover).
