By Chris Cosci

I am often intimidated when shopping for clothes. It has nothing to do with the ever-changing styles of clothing. It's not because of the multitude of choices in front of me. It doesn't even involve prices, sizes or colors. What intimidates me is the way the employees fold the shirts.

It drives me crazy that I am utterly incapable of folding a shirt in the same manner. I can fold one well enough to fit into a drawer or a suitcase. But the clothing stores use some highly advanced folding method that allows for shirts to be stacked in impossibly neat and organized piles. Once you remove a shirt, there is no way of getting back into the pile without creating a mess.

I pick up shirts to try them on or to see how the whole shirt looks unfolded. When I'm done, I carefully look for the subtle crease marks from the original fold. I work the whole unfolding routing backward to return the shirt to its original form. But it never works. After careful refolding, the shirt in my hand barely resembles the ideal forms staring at me from the shelf, mocking my pathetic attempts.

At first, I thought that maybe all I needed was a little bit of practice. I would try at home, taking my shirts and laying them out smooth on a flat surface. Then I'd fold the shirt slowly, working one sleeve at a time. No luck. I always wind up with chaos.

For further embarrassment, a store employee will walk over when I'm done. In five seconds, the employee will have the shirt perfectly folded and ready for stocking. And they seem to do it in one effortless move. One second they have a shirt dangling from their hands. Then, poof - it's magically folded. They do it so casually, you get the feeling they could do it with their eyes closed and one hand tied behind their back.

It just isn't natural. I am convinced that these employees are required to attend a four-week training course to learn this craft, covering folding basics for all types of shirts, from t-shirts to turtleneck sweaters. And later classes enforce the advanced concepts of precise folding for orderly stacking.

This training must also include a special section on fitting folded shirts into those shallow gift boxes designed for shirts. Whenever you get a shirt as a gift, you usually take it out of the box to show people. Then you can never get it to fit back into the box just right. You always wind up stuffing the shirt in the box or partially closing the box so that one corner winds up sticking in the air.

Of course, even if one day I do figure out the secret to properly folding a shirt, I guarantee that no person on the planet can tell me how to fold a fitted bed sheet. It just can't be done. Regular sheets are simple - they're just large rectangles that you keep folding in half. But fitted sheets have the elastic ends that resist proper folding.

I have tried dozens of methods, none of which work. No matter how you fold it, you always wind up with a lumpy wad of material that is roughly three times the size of the folded regular sheet.

While there may be no solution to the fitted sheet problem, there is one for the shirts: simply hang them all up. Sure, I might need a much larger closet. But by hanging them all up, I'll never have to worry about having folding envy again. Plus, I'll have all that extra drawer space, which I could use to stuff in all of my unfolded fitted sheets.