I couldn't find my

centre drills.

I knew I had some. Several, in fact. 

Must have had them; used them at school and at home.

Different diameters. Some with a black oxide finish.

But not to be found when I needed them.

Naturally, I went out and bought some more. Just a few. When I came home, I carefully placed them in a small drawer, and labelled the drawer using one of those portable electric label-making thingies. 

Shortly thereafter, I went looking for my brazed carbide tool bits. These were easy to locate. They resided in a little, round tin with "crbd ctrs"scrawled semi-legibly across the top in fat magic marker. Inside, as expected, were the cutters. And, of course, a small stash of 

centre drills. 

Dutifully, I extracted these intruders and placed them in the freshly labelled centre drill drawer.

Later, I felt a need to spend some quality time re-familiarising myself with the controls of the Emco lathe. It has many more features than my Myford, with power cross feed, quick change gearbox, and assorted levers for all manner of speeds and feeds. As I was poking through the accompanying trays of accessories for this lathe looking for a special metric wrench I came across some

centre drills. 

After a moment's reflection, these were carried to their new home - the newly marked tray in its cabinet of similar trays, each bearing their own tiny cache of useful bits & bobs, all sorted and stored for future retrieval and subsequent employment.

One feature on the Emco gave me a bit of grief - the high speed motor control setting would not do what I expected it to do. In a fit of rationality, I went to look in the manual (apparently, I am constantly "letting down the side" by actually reading these documents instead of stabbing randomly at controls, hoping to retain the same number of fingers I started with). The manual sat astride the top of the cabinet of tiny drawers, drooping slightly forward due to the weight of its binding. When I lifted it up, I noticed it had been obscuring the top row of drawers, one of which had been carefully labelled

centre drills.

I shall leave it to the reader to guess what was inside.