Key's keys.

Ever come across one of these?

Yep---mystery key.

Why does this keep happening??!?!?

Is what I'd have said as a youth, when the junk drawer in our ancestral home kept filling with keys to which there seemed to be no locks. I thought it was fate, mocking our family name, but eventually I discovered that it happened to every homeowner. 

A key without a lock may seem like a spirit separated from its body, and yet it's not as bad as a lock without a key. That could get you in a real jam. A lock without a key is a problem; a key without a lock is a nuisance. 

Why is a solo key a nuisance? My example is the one above, which I found in a very little-used drawer. It's a Kwikset; that's my only clue. The tag was blank. I know we've replaced several locks---was this one? 

I basically have three choices: 

1) Throw it away and hope it doesn't fit a lock where it might come in handy (even though that clearly has not happened in more than a decade); 

2) Try every lock in the house and see if it works on any of them, and if so, label it correctly; 

3) Put it back in the drawer and forget about it for another 10 years. 

Give ya one guess!

And there it shall probably sit, until I lose something again that brings me to the Mystery Drawer of Hidden Delights, or until we move, whichever comes first. If we move I will probably be forced to check every lock in the house with the key as a service to the new owners, and then throw it away because we got rid of its lock twenty years before.