The Respondent, then fourteen, had been assigned in the spring of 2022 the household task of sortation and pairing of clean laundry. The arrangement had been the Client's idea. The Client had reasoned, prospectively, that the task was low-skill, high-volume, and presented the Respondent with an opportunity to contribute to the household economy in a manner commensurate with her actual abilities. The Respondent had agreed, after the offer of a small allowance increase. The arrangement had functioned, in a manner that approached but did not quite reach functional, for approximately six months.
The complaint, when brought to the Journal in early November, was specific. The household had lost — at the Client's count — approximately twenty-three individual socks during the relevant six-month period. Pairs had been broken at a rate of approximately one pair every ten days. Solo socks were accumulating in a small wicker basket in the laundry room that the Client had labeled, with what we read as resigned humor, "the orphanage."
The Affirmative Defense
The Respondent's defense was creative. She did not deny that the laundry was her responsibility. She did not deny that pairs had gone missing. She did, however, attribute the disappearances to what she called, with what we will note was a certain insouciance, "the black hole in the dryer." This formulation, the Respondent maintained, was not metaphorical. She had observed — empirically, she said — that pairs entered the dryer intact and emerged depaired. The only physically possible explanation, to her mind, was that a singularity of some kind had developed inside the dryer's drum and was selectively absorbing one member of each pair.
The Journal allowed that the dryer was, in fact, a closed mechanical system from which a sock should not, under the laws of conservation of mass, be capable of disappearing. We also allowed that the doctrine of res ipsa loquitur — "the thing speaks for itself" — might, in unusual circumstances, support an inference of mechanical fault in cases where no other explanation is available. The doctrinal weakness in the Respondent's argument, however, was that several other explanations were available, the most obvious being that the socks were not, in fact, all entering the dryer in pairs, because the Respondent was not, in fact, sorting them carefully on the way in.
The Adversarial Inspection
We proposed an experimental verification. The Client would, over a single laundry cycle, supervise the loading and unloading directly, marking each pair as it entered the wash and recounting at the end. The Respondent agreed, with the equanimity of a defendant who has not yet realized that empirical verification is a one-way ratchet. The cycle was conducted on a Saturday afternoon. Sixteen pairs entered the wash. Fourteen pairs emerged. Two singletons emerged. The two singletons, on inspection of the lint trap and the dryer drum, were not present. They were also not present in the wash drum. They were, the Client and the Journal could only conclude, somewhere in the house.
The Respondent took this result as vindication. The Journal was inclined to read it differently. We observed that the Respondent had, when loading the wash, dropped at least one sock on the laundry room floor — an action she had not registered at the moment — and had carried two other socks up to her bedroom, draped over an arm, where they had presumably been deposited and subsequently lost. The dryer was, we were forced to conclude, doctrinally innocent. The mechanism of disappearance was the Respondent's diffuse attention. The black hole was, as it were, between the loads.
Disposition
The matter was resolved by the introduction of a sock-color-coding scheme of the Client's design: each child's socks were purchased in a single distinctive color, such that any solo sock could be reattached to its statistical pair without manual identification. The scheme reduced orphanings by, the Client estimates, eighty percent. The Respondent was not pleased about the loss of variety in her sock options. She filed no formal counter-petition. She did refer to the new sock regime, in conversation with a cousin (a cousin the Client had not realized was within earshot at the time), as "kind of dictatorial." The Client filed this observation in her own internal docket. She did not respond. She did, the Journal is told, purchase one additional package of socks in a color the Respondent had specifically said she did not want.