Okay. So my hypothesis on hosiery goes that you don't actually lose socks in the washing machine, you just get one extra every once in a while. Free socks, yay!
But. Consider this: if you suddenly have an odd sock appear in this realm, it must go missing in another one. (It's socks physics, I don't want to bore you here with science.)
Point being: somewhere there's a realm of missing socks... [cue intro]