The importance of keys

We live in a semi-rural area where our mailbox is at the end of the street in a big rack along with everyone else’s mailbox.  It takes a key to open your individual mailbox.
So what happens when the mailbox key disappears?

Panic. Anger. Casting blame upon everyone who might possibly have come into contact with that key.  Finally, the realization sets in that perhaps the key hasn’t really disappeared, it’s just hiding.  So, you go back searching through the location where the key is supposed to be kept and , lo and behold, the key is crammed into a CD case where it was overlooked the first 2 or 3 hundred times it was searched.

The moral of this story, if there is one, is that individual keys, just like other important individual items, shouldn’t be a single copy that hopefully won’t be lost.  Sooner or later, bad things can happen, the ounce of prevention is always easier than the pound of cure.