It all started with a dirty sock on the bathroom floor…and the rest is history!
A dirty sock on the bathroom floor of Xep Campbell’s home is a rather normal sight, however this dirty sock turned into a viral sensation.
Campbell’s 10-year-old daughter, Kestrel, leaves random clothes lying around from time to time, and most of the time, Campbell just tosses them in the laundry hamper.
This time, Campbell decided to see if her daughter would take care of the dirty sock on her own.
“I just decided to see how long it would stay there without my intervention,” said Campbell, adding that the sock remained on the white-tiled bathroom floor, untouched, for an entire week.
Campbell decided to put the dirty sock on display — literally. She turned the sock into an art exhibit of sorts, right on the bathroom floor. Complete with a museum label tag that hung on the wall just above the dirty sock.
She gave the display a name: “The Forgotten Sock.” Below it, she wrote: “Mixed Media” and “On loan from the collection of the artist.”
Campbell that her daughter (Kestrel) would chuckle and then just toss the dirty sock into the hamper, but Kestrel had a different idea. She positioned the sock on a wooden pedestal she made last year, a contribution she said elevated the exhibit.
That’s when the display unexpectedly turned from a mother-daughter standoff to an elaborate and absurd bonding activity
The display clearly needed an audience, so Kestrel added some barnyard animals around the exhibit. In addition, Kestrel also erected a tiny version of the mysterious ‘monolith’, a clear shoutout to the mysterious structures that have been popping up at random around the world.
Campbell posted the progression of the evolving exhibit on Facebook on Dec. 2, as well as an outline of the sequence of events, thinking others might get a laugh.
On the evening of Thanksgiving when I went to bed I noticed one of Kestrel’s socks on the bathroom floor. I decided not…
Posted by Xep Campbell on Wednesday, December 2, 2020
What she didn’t expect was a huge reaction.
“I initially posted it privately on Facebook, and some friends asked if I could make it shareable. I usually don’t do that,” Campbell said. But after confirming it was fine with Kestrel, she made the post public, and to her amazement, it completely blew up.
“This has been such a crazy year for everybody from every walk of life, and dirty laundry is something we can all identify with,” Campbell said. “We all desperately need something to laugh about, and somehow, the sock became that thing.”
To date, the post has been shared about 150,000 times, and thousands of comments have poured in.