You know what's just never good?

Something that's never good is when you go to the grocery and the cashier scans all your food items and you reach out to give her your money with a used dryer sheet hanging out of your sleeve. This isn't quite as bad as exiting a restroom with a festoon of toilet paper trailing from your shoe, but almost.

At least it is a mute testament that your clothes are clean.

The only laundry cling-on story I've ever heard that is truly awful, yet very funny is one my friend -- let's call her Frieda Jane -- told about her husband.

Frieda Jane and her husband have one daughter, and when that daughter was about four years old, they were all headed into the church one bright summer Sunday. The husband was walking slightly ahead of his two womenfolk so that he could open the door, and as he was walking, Frieda Jane noticed something very strange peeping from the left leg of his trousers. Whatever it was was being jostled down as he walked and was soon going to fall out altogether. What puzzled her was that it seemed to be....pink?

The item fell out a couple of steps later and was immediately recognizable as a pair of their daughter's Disney Princess underpants. Frieda Jane and her daughter saw the unmentionable garment at the same time and Frieda hurriedly stooped to pick it up, but her daughter felt the need for editoral commentary.

"Daddy," Frieda Jane Junior squealed in that piercing tone of voice children use when they're getting ready to say something that will wake you up in the middle of the night, flinching, for years to come: "Daddy? WHY ARE YOU WEARING GIRLS' PANTIES?"

Frieda Jane jacknifed over in laughter and her husband turned around, mortified, because it was that church time when everybody arrives at once and there were roughly three thousand other people all hurrying for the doors, but not hurrying so much that they couldn't register F.J. Junior's eyebrow-raising remark.

Frieda herself was still laughing about it as she told a group of us at our monthly Moms' Night Out dinner. "At least, " she quavered, wiping tears of mirth from her eyes, "at least it didn't happen as we were going forward for communion."