Super Eco

Photo credit: ms.lume, flickr

Once upon a time I had a boss, a retired chemist, who had very good taste in shirts but bad luck with fountain pens. Some of his most handsome shirts had icky ink stains in the bottoms of the pockets, no doubt due to faulty pocket protectors. One beautiful blue paisley in particular was sporting a giant blue ink stain one day. Somewhere in the back of my brain I remembered my mother using milk to remove stains. I told him to "give me that shirt"—luckily he was wearing a nifty tee shirt underneath—"I am sick of looking at that stain!"

I dashed across the street to the local diner for a glass of full fat whole milk (it works much better than low fat or skim), popped the shirt pocket into the glass and let it soak. After soaking it for about an hour I began to work the stain a bit by rubbing the fabric together. After another hour of soaking the stain began to really fade and disappear. He washed the shirt that evening and—voila!—the next time he wore it to work the stain was gone. His wife was elated (nooo, I did not get a salary increase) and we all lived happily ever after, The End.