True story:
As many know I do a lot of electric motor repairs for the rewind trade. Don't rewind but do the mechanical work like broken shafts, spun bearings etc.
One of my jobs it to recondition the brush gear on special DC motors after they have caught fire or melted.
The brass brush boxes are usually folded up from brass sheet and hammered round formers. This is where the box of spare slips comes in handy.
These came originally from Erricsons telephones out of the toolrooms, many of the larger ones have Packing or P etched on them and I suspect they are second grade and were bough in for just this purpose as they had loads of first grade carbide slips in sets.
Because they are not in sets and have P etched on them, to me they are just packing and ideal for brush boxes as you can always build up a stack to the right size then whack the sheet round them and get a nice square brush box.
So one day I'm doing a set when I see this pillock approaching who used to be the bane of my life in that every job he brought had to be perfect and he went to great pains to tell me how to do it even though the jobs were crap jobs.
So this day i spotted him, rushed over and got the set of first grade carbide inspection slips I own but in all fairness never had a use for them. Pulled three out the box, similar to the sizes i was using and as he entered proceeded to smack this sheet round the packing slips.
He stopped dead and asked if I was using slip gauges, I replied yes because the bends had to be exact, square and to a tolerance of 0.000000023"
He shook his head slowly and agreed with me but that was the last time I saw the twonk.