The Keys to the Kingdom of the Shop

How many of you have old keys hanging around? Maybe they're on your key ring, or perhaps in your junk drawer. At the Shop, we have keys hanging on nails right inside the office door, most of which haven't been used in ages. 

Some are the keys to cars which have long met the compactor.  I know that one key is for the last flatbed truck we had for delivering welders. That truck's been gone 35 or 40 years. We also still have the key from a 1961 Ford delivery truck. Interesting thing about that one: me Grandpa Joe bought it off of Seven-Up, the soda pop company. He didn't bother removing the logo, simply painting over it. You could see the Seven-Up image underneath the red of the driver's door.

Smaller keys are old shop locks for padlocks which are who knows where. Most of them have not been touched since well before Pops died, and he's been gone coming up on eleven years.

Why don't we get rid of them? I dunno. It's habit to have them there I suppose. One key is attached to a key ring which has the baby from the first Incredibles cartoon. That's, what, 2004? The baby is no longer bald but has a nice head of dust hair. It's to be expected I suppose, after hanging inside the doorway for close to 20 years now.

Some of those keys might even fit locks we still have if we were to try and find them. I'm not fired up to find out though. I suspect me kids when clearing out the old barn hopefully way, way into the future, will wonder why the hell we kept them, and just toss them out. So it goes.