A Closet Heist

I’m losing pants at an alarming rate.

Let me get you up to speed on my investigation:

First, I have no idea at what point in the supply line my pants are getting lost. My routine is pretty standard. Once I take my clothes off, I toss them in the laundry basket. Maybe 5-7 days later, I gather a batch of clothes and take them down to the laundry room where I promptly dump the batch into the washing machine.

After 50 minutes going through the various washing cycles, I transfer the clothes to the dryer. Once dried, they end up on my bed until I decide to put the clothes away. There have been times when my clothes are placed in a temporary holding spot on my desk chair as I go to bed in my bed; my missing pants are not on my desk chair.

Eventually, my dress pants get hung up in my closet.

Somewhere in that process, I have lost two pairs of dress pants.

Like most laundry aficionados, I am well aware of the Missing Sock Phenomenon. No matter how close I pay attention, I always end up with an odd number of socks. Sooner or later, I will find a sock stuck in a pant leg or hiding inside a shirt right next to a dyer sheet. More than once, I have left the house wearing a sock on my right foot with a gray heel and on my left foot would be a sock with yellow stitching going across my toes. While they’re not an exact match, they are close enough. Besides, most people hardly notice. If they do, they rarely say anything because they’re in the same position I am.

It’s one thing to lose a sock though; it’s another to misplace a pair of trousers.

Right after Christmas, I used the sale opportunities to restock my dress pants’ inventory. Most of mine were worn at the seams and frayed at the edges. So I bought seven new pairs of pants – what can I say, I’m a sucker for the “buy ones, get ones.”

Several laundry cycles later, I was down to just six pair of pants. I was positive that I purchased two black pair of pants. However, after looking in my closet, I only spotted one. Since you normally don’t lose a pair of pants like you would a sock, I doubted my original seven and assumed that perhaps I only bought six.

But I was just lying to myself. Deep down, I knew I bought seven.

A couple weeks later, I felt like wearing my gray pants. It just felt like a gray pants kind of day, you know?

Lo and behold, my gray pants were missing too.

Something was going on.

Whoever was behind the Missing Sock Phenomenon must be to blame for my Disappearing Trouser Incident! I’m convinced that somewhere out there, there is some human being walking around in my gray pants while wearing my mismatched socks.

This whole situation is giving me a headache. I haven’t been this confused since spotting the ice cube display stand at the local Wal-Mart. Near the front, there’s a typical two door freezer with bags of ice for sale. On the front, in bright colors and fancy fonts, was a sign advertising these bags of ice as being “Healthier than Homemade!” Last I checked, ice cubes were still just frozen water. I didn’t see anyway for the Wal-Mart water to be any healthier than water at home.

They had another sign declaring “From Our Freezer to Yours!” Despite these tough economic times, it seems like these people are going through a lot of trouble to sell frozen water.

Despite being utterly baffled over Wal-Mart’s ice cube sales pitch, there was at least a valid motivation behind it – to sell more frozen water in bags.

But to steal pants?

Who would want to steal my pants? What’s the motivation for such a deed?

I went on a scavenger hunt looking for my gray pants. While I couldn’t locate those, I did find my second pair of black pants, stuck between two dress shirts.

With my second black pants found and back in the rotation, my focus was on retrieving my gray pants. I really liked them, especially how they presented my magnanimous gluts. You can’t easily ignore a benefit such as that; I had to find those gray pants!

As I thought more about it, I started to wonder if this was God’s way of telling me to dress sluttier by showing off some leg. For not working out much, I do have some pretty well-defined calf muscles. I suppose I could resort to rockin’ some shorts, but this weather is not conducive to showing off my thigh dermis.

I last wore my gray pants a couple weeks ago. I remember this because when I went home for lunch, I spilled some leftover spaghetti sauce and had to change my pants. I was curious if anyone at work would notice. Nobody noticed.

More importantly, that was the last time I saw my gray pants. They went into my dirty laundry pile, then simply vanished.

Last weekend, I did do some house cleaning and picked out several items of clothing that I intended to donate to the Salvation Army. I distinctly remember throwing my old clothes on the other side of my bedroom so as not to have them intermingle with the clothes I intended to keep.

It has been hypothesized that perhaps I accidentally threw my gray pants into the Salvation Army pile. I summarily rejected this theory as my Salvation Army pile consisted of items that I took out of my dresser; my gray pants were in the dirty laundry pile as a result of the spaghetti sauce splotch.

To this day, I have no idea where my gray pants went. Lost? Stolen? Something even more sinister at play here?

I don’t know. I have a real mystery on my hands.

I just wish I had some pants on my legs.