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I had lain awake far too long the night before, wondering what my first day at the bomb factory would be like. Testing Grenades? That didn't sound very fun at all. How do you test a grenade? What if someting went wrong? When I finally got to sleep, I was haunted by dreams of Bugs Bunny sitting next to an assembly line bonking artillery shells on the nose with a great big hammer. Every ten or so shells would explode. I didn't get much rest. Morning came. I kissed my wife and baby and drove off to test grenades. It wasn't anything like I thought. I spent that day, from before sunrise until after sunset, test-chambering practice grenades. Practice grenades look like great big plastic bullets. They're fired from a grenade launcher and make a big blue mark on the ground when they land. Practice grenades have to fit perfectly into the chamber of the grenade launcher, so the makers of practice grenades hire some hapless chump to stand in a concrete building wearing earplugs and stick them, one by one, into a the chamber of a grenade launcher, all for the princely sum of three dollars and thirty five cents per hour. For most of the cold cold winter of 1986, I was that chump. I stood there in my ten by ten concrete bunker with a pallete of untested grenades to my left and a pallete of tested grenades to my right. In the center of the room was a huge chunk of iron about waist high. A grenade launcher was welded to it upside down. The firing pin, I was assured, had been removed. A big hunk of steel had been welded to the end of the barrel. This was a safety feature. In case of an accidental discharge, that hunk of steel would stop the grenade and ensure that probably nobody will be killed. There was a piece of paper taped to one of the walls:
Underneath these instructions were the photocopied signatures of the Directors of Production, Material Handling, Safety and Quality Control. A practice grenade is the exact size and weight of a real grenade. It has a charge that propels the grenade about as far as a really good golfer can drive a golfball. The projectile part of the grenade is full of bright blue powder that makes a big blue mark on the ground. The first time one of those things went off in test chamber, it caught me a little off guard. BLAM! Why, it sounded like somebody had just shot a gun in there. The sound echoed off the concrete walls. There was a flash of light and a loud CLANK! as the zinc ballast slammed into the safety feature welded to the barrel of the test chamber. The nose cone of the grenade shattered and the room was instantly full of blue dye. It started snowing gently down over me. As I stood blinking in the blue snowstorm, as my hearing began to return, I heard the tester in the next cell over call to me, "Hey Elvis! Are you ok?" He poked his head around the concrete dividing wall. "Elvis?" I said, still blinking. "You know," he said motioning towards the blue snowfall, "Blue Christmas. You have to sing that song at lunch, by the way. Tradition." "You're gonna have to sweep up all this dye, clean out your test chamber, and get it checked by QA", he continued. "WHAT THE HECK WAS THAT?" I hollered rhetorically. Actually, I didn't really say exactly that, but if you squint your eyes a little and read the expletive, you'll get the idea. "That's called a scrap part, Elvis" my new friend informed me. "You have to make a tick mark on this clipboard." He gestured toward a clipboard hung on the wall. It was blue. It had a bunch of tick marks on it. A LOT of tick marks. "Don't worry about it, Elvis. It happens. You turn blue. You sing your song. You get used to it." It was dark that night as I stood there, bright blue against the bright florescent lights of the gas station. I pumped my gas and I thought about the events of the day. My friend was wrong, though. I never really did get used to it. |