Sometimes I think weekends are wasted on errands. I needed to pick up and drop off some clothes from the cleaners, and was confronted by the sight of a tangled pile of wire hangers that I meant to return to the dry cleaning place.

It’s not like the offending jumble was a surprise — I could see it on the floor out of the corner of my eye when I opened my closet door. I didn’t like using the wire hangers, and I didn’t want them to take up space on the small closet rod, so I kept dropping more hangers to the whole mess every time I pulled a shirt out of the dry cleaning plastic.

So I figured I’d get it over with and give back the hangers for reuse. But once I began to arrange them, the more difficult it started to get; hangers have a hook each, after all, and each hook was twisted up with at least one other hanger. I would pull a few hangers out and find them connected with hangers in the middle of the pile, so I stopped and pulled a few hangers from another direction, and found that it wouldn’t work either.

I couldn’t tell where each hanger began and ended, and I shook the pile hoping any loose hangers would fall out. None did. And I could feel, in the back of my mind, this angry voice about to pipe up and tell me that I didn’t have time for this, that I still had to do my sit-ups and jump in the shower and eat breakfast and drink my coffee and walk the dog and I felt that I was about to scream and —

And then I stopped. I stopped right before the voice could speak. And I looked at the hangers and realized there was only one way to do this — one proper way, which was perhaps also the proper way to do things in general.

One hanger at a time.

(I managed to pack up the hangers in about five minutes.)