HOW DENTAL FLOSS DRIES CLOTHES

One of these days, I’m going to look up the tensile strength of dental floss. I use floss for so many things. It's actually surprisingly strong—a fact I’ve discovered over many years of tying floss to a wide variety of fairly heavy items.

I’m not sure when I first started using dental floss as “utility string” because I’ve been using it for such a long time. For instance, say you want to measure something pretty large (some kind of furniture or an apartment’s room dimensions), but you don’t really want to carry a big, hefty tape measure in your pocket. Dental floss to the rescue. It comes in a perfectly convenient, small container that is lightweight and easily pocketable. Lengths of it can be cut off easily with the built-in cutter, and it can run hundreds of yards long.

I’ve used floss to hang all sorts of things: Christmas ornaments on the tree, fresh-cut flowers hung upside-down to dry out, various decorations and even small picture frames. To me, dental floss is arguably more useful than duct tape since it can be used more discreetly.

For the outdoors, I once used a whole roll of dental floss for an impromptu kite-flying session. Kids really love it when you can conjure up a disposable kite, and they can just run around without worrying about losing it or breaking it.  

My proudest MacGyver moment using dental floss, though, has to be when I was traveling in Vietnam last year with my wife, and I amazed her with my dental-floss ingenuity. We got caught in a sudden rain, and we needed to dry out our clothes at the hotel. Floss served as a clothesline, strung across our hotel room, for several wet items. Having dental floss handy really saved the day that time, and now whenever I travel, my wife always reminds me to bring plenty of dental floss.