Every... time...

And, even after all that, when you go to put the sheet on the bed you still find a sock.

and inside that sock is a wadded paper towel, rock hard and flaking
- Sorry mom, that paper towel was rock hard and flaking before the wash too.
You can search thoroughly in the fitted sheet shoved over your head to look closely and you'll still miss the damp sock somehow.

Just stop secreting oils and losing cells from your skin so you can sleep on a bare mattress. 🤷🏻‍♂️

I use a laundry bag for any sheets to avoid this

Thats why I stopped using dryers and just hang stuff out to dry. Also saves a lot of energy.

Look at Mx. Privilege over here talking about wide open living spaces.
- When I lived in a 42 sqm apartment I just put them in the middle of the one room I had. It did require walking around them all of the time, and an apartment that small became quite humid when hang-drying inside, but I managed to pull it off.
- Even in a small apartment it's doable, speaking from experience. Just get the kind of rack you can hang over a door or radiator.
It's nice to have a house, eh. Or a balcony. Or both. Or a nearby meadow. Or some electrical wiring attached between apartment buildings.
- I dry stuff inside on a rack like this. I've got a yard, but that yard is full of birds who like to sit and shit on my clean clothes.
  Sheets and towels go in the dryer though.
- My previous apartment has none of those, just a rack in the bedroom and an open window.
- "Oh look at fancy lad with an little space in some part of their living space for temporarily drying clothes"
  Lmao
towels become so much softer in the dryer though :)
- Exactly. I hate that coarse air-dried towel feeling. Like sandpaper.
- True. I prefer hard towels, so it's not an issue for me.

I was in a band called Pathetically Sodden Washcloth. Mostly Trip hop, a bit of Crust punk.

I googled crust punk with a genuine thirst for knowledge, but didn't know enough about music to understand the answer lol. On a side note, back in the 80s one time I saw a Portland band called Butt Seepage.

I'll never understand why dryers can't simply reverse direction several times during the cycle to prevent this from happening all the time.

I think once the clothes are trapped in the bedsheet it’s game over. I’m not sure changing directions would prevent it in the first place, unless it was literally just shaking or something close to it.
- It actually does help! Many commercial grade dryers have exactly this feature and it does exactly that. You can sometimes find it at brand new laundromats and I can confirm it somehow magically stops them from wrapping into one big old ball

I picture the sheet having the hangdog look of a dog that stole a steak off the cutting board.

As an aside I successfully folded a fitted sheet recently, and obviously I'm a wizard now.

Fucking necromancers and their black magic.

I bought a cheap knock-off of a shark tank product, where you clip the four corners of the sheets together - and it’s worked a treat.

In retrospect, a large enough laundry bag as another comment mentioned would also work wonders!

There are zipper "fitted" sheets that avoid this problem

That's what garment bags are for, never have to worry about shit getting in your sheet of you jail it ahead of time.

Fitted sheets are garbage. Get extra large flat ones and one of those alligator clip elastic strap thingies that holds it together underneath the mattress.

I can't imagine that staying oerfectly wrinkle free
- I'm more inclined to believe that any attempt at tightening the sheet down will inevitably create holes at the corners.
  Pretty sure there's a reason fitted sheets exist. Like, imagine this advice for a t-shirt?
  'Just get a really big piece of cloth and kind wrap it around yourself a few times, then stick a pin in it'
  To each their own but — no, I think I'll stick to my shirt.
- 🤷‍♂️