Sadly, this phrase was far too common place in my vocabulary.  It would typically happen at work.  I thought I was alone in the world with this problem.  No one else at work seemed to have this issue.  It wasn't until my last job where I finally heard someone else mutter similar words, cursing about an elbow.  I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders and no longer thought I was an outcast.  I spoke to my co-worker and found out he had the same problem all the time.  After uncovering another person, I started to see it more prevalent in the work place.  The problem I and many others was suffering from is elbow blowout.

Elbow blowout is the sudden appearance of a tear or hole in the elbow of a dress shirt.  It always seemed to happen completely out of the blue.  I was very suspicious of a sharp edge on my desk or somewhere else in my life.  This kept happening all too often.  My favorite shirts were being attacked mercilessly and the costs of these premature deaths were rising.  My luck of finding more people with this problem started my focus on other things that could be causing the problem.  We had some things in common like it always happened on the same elbow every time.  I stopped being suspicious about my dry cleaner, Mrs. Fix-It (maybe she didn't like the shirt), some random sharp edge, or my arms being too long.  It became obvious that it was wear that was causing the blow outs. It happened to our favorite shirts, that we likely wore more often than the others.