You know you’re a nurse if... you triage the laundry when at home: This pile needs immediate attention, the pile can wait, this pile, with a little stain stick will be OK until you get back to it.

The quip humorously shows how professional habits can spill into everyday life. “Triage” is a clinical method of sorting patients by urgency; applying it to laundry suggests that nurses are trained to assess priorities quickly, even off-duty. The joke also nods to the cognitive load of nursing: constant evaluation, time pressure, and pragmatic problem-solving become second nature. By translating a high-stakes workplace skill into a mundane domestic task, the line both celebrates nurses’ competence and gently acknowledges how hard it can be to “switch off” the nurse mindset. It functions as insider humor that builds solidarity and recognition among nurses.