There Really is a Sock Hell

Of course, you know about Sock Hell, right?? It's the secret place that all the unmatched socks go to and live in torment forever without their mates! We all have socks that go there. If you have a large family, as we do, you've had more socks go there than you care to think about. I used to believe that there was a "foolproof" system that I should be able to implement to achieve Sock Success. I was wrong. It used to be something that bothered me immensely...I should be able to put all these socks in the washing machine and expect that I will get them all back. Well, Great Expectations is a novel written by Charles Dickens and is not something that is going to get me discouraged. Not regarding socks, anyway.
Last week, as I was doing laundry my lovely front loading washing machine became unlovely. It started making these three beeps and flashing a little coded message on the screen. " F" blink, blink "02" blink, blink and then it would repeat itself. What it would not do, however, was rinse and spin my laundry. That is a problem. A family of 7 does not need its laundry process slowed down for any reason because the process of 7 people making laundry does not slow down for anything!
Praise the Lord our machines are still under warranty so I just called the handy dandy 800 number and talked to a bland sounding female who made an appointment with a local service company. Finally, yesterday, the repairman came, at 7:30 in the morning, mind you. There aren't a lot of people that I'm happy to see at 7:30 in the morning, but since the washer was kaput for 5 days, I was in the mood to see this repairman.
He pulled the washer out from the wall, tipped it backward, removed the lower front panel, and there before my very eyes was Sock Hell or as the repair guy called it "the coin catcher". See?? I always knew it was true!! Sure enough, it does catch coins, but what it had caught for me was socks! Not lots of socks, just two... two socks, three pennies, a Chuck E. Cheese token, a blue glass marble thing, a wad of gauze stuff and a string. They were in this coin catcher thing, it was very dirty and stinky inside. It was , to me, classified as nasty. I threw the socks in the trash because the color they came out as and the smell that accompanied them were NOT something I was interested in saving. I suppose I could have tried to wash them clean, but why take the chance of losing them again? All he had to do was unscrew the lid and pull them out with some pliers. So, after he removed the offending items, the washing machine worked fine, Now, after watching, I know how to get to the secret place again if the need arises.
Maybe its not an exciting thing to you, but for me... well, it's funny and something that my small mind gets pleasure in learning. Closure for a small area of life's unanswered questions.