Sock It to Me

It’s an age-old college tradition: put a sock on your doorknob to alert your roommate that you have a guest over and would like some privacy.

I was reading in my dorm room when my next-door neighbor Colin came over.
“Can I wait in here for a while?” Colin asked.
“Sure, why?” I replied.
“Ted put a sock on the door.”
I oohed like a preteen. “Who is he in there with?”
“I don’t know.”
We speculated to no avail. For the next half hour, we chatted, waiting for Colin’s room to open up until Ted finally dropped by my place.

“What have you been up to?” I asked, fishing for some gossip.
“Class,” he said.
“Really?” I asked, hoping to break his cover.
“Yeah,” he said, so nonchalantly that it was convincing.
“You weren’t in the room?” Colin tried.
“No why?” Ted asked.

We led Ted to the door and showed him the sock. He admitted that it looked like his, though he denied putting it there. Cautiously, they opened the door and found the room empty of people – amorous or otherwise. Colin was sexiled for no apparent reason. But why?

Later that evening, a bunch of us were eating dinner.
“Did you get the sock I left for you?” Desiree asked.
“You put the sock there?!” a confused Ted asked.
“You left it in my room,” she replied.
As it turned out, Desiree had never heard of the sock-on-the-doorknob symbol, she just thought it was a convenient place to leave it for him. Unwittingly, she had managed to keep people out of their own room. She called it a mistake, I call it a sockcess.