They were in the dryer, not underneath the Meadowlands!
That’s just madness. Assert that in Wisconsin, and you’ll smell our dairy air!
Nice.
Related to one of my favorite Steven Wright jokes:
I’d have thought you of all people would be more up on the classics… That’s paperclips, not socks.
In all seriousness, I think that the most common culprit is people throwing away their own socks. One laundry day, one of them gets kicked under the bed, or stays in the bottom of the laundry bag, or something mundane like that. The person doing laundry, though, when they see the mismatch, says “Well, this sock isn’t any good any more now that its mate has disappeared”, and throws that sock away. The next week, the perfectly mundane disappearance is resolved, but now there’s another odd sock, and so that one gets thrown out as well.
Simple solution: Just hold onto your mismatched socks and wait. Which is especially easy if, like @wolfpup and me, you make sure that all of your socks match.
Mismatched socks are just new dusting rags.
Odd that you should mention this…
Once upon a time (in a galaxy far, far away…no, wait…) my late husband had a pair of very thick socks. White with a red band around the top. Exactly the kind of socks I like to wear around the house in the winter time. At some point after he died, I could only ever find one sock at a time. But I KNEW the other sock was around somewhere, so I just kept waiting for it to turn up. I never put it in the wash because, seeing as how there was only one, I never wore it. But from time to time when rummaging through various drawers, I’d come across the thick white sock with the red band and think, “Great! That’s the missing sock.” But in fact, I still never knew if that was the missing sock or the original sock.
To put things in perspective, my husband passed away in 2000, and I lived 12 more years in our house, then I moved to this house. At the time of the move I did give away virtually all of his clothes, but by this time, the sock(s) had migrated into MY sock-underwear-tshirts drawer. So all that stuff came to the new house (that I’ve now been in for almost 11 years).
So for 23 years I’ve been searching for the missing sock. Every time I come across the thick white sock with the red band on the top, the little flame of hope in my heart flares momentarily into brightness. Maybe this is the missing sock!! But where did I put the other sock?
Why, you may ask, don’t I just put the currently present sock somewhere like in the middle of the bed in plain view and commence to search every drawer in the bedroom for its mate? That would be the sensible thing to do. But what if I do that and don’t find the other sock? The little flame would go out. Or, more likely, as soon as I conclude that the missing sock is permanently missing and throw away the sock that is present, the missing sock will then turn up!! I can’t risk that.
I do have precedents. Maybe it’s just me but on two other occasions, I lost an item of clothing in my bedroom-- once a belt and once an earring-- and searched for these two things for years– and eventually both of them turned up. So there’s that.
The end.
Oh I like that! But I did hear that the way to breed hangers is to simply put two together, alone, in a dark empty closet. Then wait.
This is an old Banacek episode. The sock is extracted before you gather your laundry. What you’re seeing is a 3-D laser projection of a sock. Or was it, the sock had a different football jersey? Or maybe it landed at a different airport that was made to look like the one you were flying into?..
COLUMBO! It’s an old Columbo episode…
Rockford Files episode, I say @burpo_the_wonder_mutt
I used to buy all my socks in bulk - packs of 5-10 identical pairs of black socks. Not only did this solve the problem of missing socks, but also that of socks which developed holes.
Rockford is too cool for socks. Just ask Beth.
Well, yeah. But then they spawn in your clothes hamper, and you get extra and unpaired socks when you wash your clothes. And eventually the socks pupate in some as-yet-undisclosed form and emerge as clothes hangers.
Years ago we were having problems with our washer. My sister’s FIL was an appliance repairman for Sears so he would help out the whole family whenever we needed him, never accepting even a dollar. So he came over and took apart the washer. When he was done he said - the problem was these shoulder pads that were stuck in the machine. He held up a couple of removable pushup bra pads! 
I didn’t correct him, he would have been terribly embarrassed.
Beware: the sock Blob.
(Honey, have you seen the dog?)
The full life cycle is paper clips → clothes hangers → urban bicycles, as documented by Avram Davidson in his ground-breaking paper “Or All the Seas with Oysters”. Socks are a different organism.
Ooh, thank you for reminding me - years ago I bought this awesome Emerson clock radio; it has a full keypad on top so that when you go to reset it after the power goes out (because the backup 9V it also has is dead) it was real simple to set the correct time, no holding down the hour or minute button for 11:55 minutes from your current time & then accidentally going past the current time by one so you had to start over again & hold it down for another 23 or 59 advances. In a recent fairly power outage it got zapped so that only the top row works which means it’s real easy to reset as long as the current time hour is 1, 2, 3, 11, or 12 & the minute is 11, 12, 13, 21, 22, 23, 31, 32, or 33.
Thanks to reading your response at the 11:10 am, it is now set correctly again!
In the summer, I wear below-the-ankle white socks. Except they usually have a colored stripe over the toes. It seems I’ll get a hole in one of the, say, black striped ones, & then a hole in one of the red striped ones. Now I could wear the two remaining holeless ones & no one in public would know I’m wearing a mismatched pair because I’d be wearing sneakers overtop of the toes so the only possible people who could see that I’m wearing a mismatched pair are people in my house, someone who catches me changing footwear or an emergency worker if I was in a bad accident.
People in my house know me well enough that they wouldn’t judge me on that & the others are a fleeting glance with a low probability of happening who also probably wouldn’t care but why can’t I ever get holes in both socks of a matching pair rather than ½ of two pairs?
Hey mix matched socks are a fashion statement.
I keep telling myself.
“Hey! Did you realize you’re wearing one yellow sock and one purple?”
“Yes. You know, the odd thing is I have another pair just like it at home.”