Bomb factories have a rather high turnover rate. Working there makes some people nervous. So they quit, and have to be replaced. Some people explode, and have to be replaced. Some people like to blow things up a little too much. They get fired and have to be replaced.

By the time I had been working there for a year, I had been promoted from Lunkhead with a Grenade to Engineering Technician to Project Engineer to Project Manager to Director of Data Processing. This was mostly attributable to the fact that I had not yet exploded. That and the fact that I could calculate in my head the cube root of any perfect cube between zero and a million.

I learned that trick at a party. I was demonstrating it for my friends when the Plant Manager walked by, followed by his posse of sychophants. Next thing I knew, I was sitting at a desk in the Engineering Bullpen.

Being an engineer at a bomb factory is like playing all day long with tinkertoys, only they explode. It was heaven. We had linear motion, we had hydraulic and pneumatic power. We had Geneva Mechanisms and Vibratory Bowl Feeders and Programmable Logic Controllers. We had gears and cams and springs and ball-joint-rod-ends. And when we were done with something, we usually blew it to smithereens.

One of the weirdest things we had was a chemical. No, I won't tell you the name. It looked a lot like tang. It was an orange granular substance which was almost as light as air. If you opened a container of the stuff, the little crystals would take flight and form an orange cloud around the container.

This stuff was agroscopic, so it would absorb water from the air, and become heavy enough to precipitate.

When the chemical had absorbed enough water to be heavier than air, it changed color from Tang Orange to 1970's Refrigerator Orange. Little burnt umber pellets would suddenly appear in the air and fall to the floor.

My job was to figure out how to handle the stuff. I bought an old Mobile Home and sealed up the doors and windows. Then I ran four dehumidifiers day and night to dry out the air. Then I got a million dollars worth of this stuff and hired a half a dozen folks to do something with this stuff; I'm not at liberty to say what.

The poor chumps who were hired to work in this Plywood Box of Discomfort were given eye protection, breathing protection, latex gloves and space-suit-type clothes to protect them from the Airborne Tang. The crystals were so small, though, that they passed through any clothes we could find, rendering the Poor Chumps just as orange as an Orange Guy from the flare line.

The Plywood Box of Discomfort was air-conditioned to prevent the Poor Chumps from sweating and ruining the million dollars worth of Tang. Once they stepped outside, the sweat from their skins would turn them the color of a '76 Frigidaire.

I had worked in the PBoD during the initial phases of production, so I drove home more than one dark night caked in orange, looking like a Human Onion Ring.

Then I'd go down the hall to the bathroom, turn off the lights and get in the shower.

As soon as the water touched my skin, it burst into bright green fluorescence. The whole room would light up ghostly green and I'd be a glowing Alien Visitor for about ten minutes. That part was pretty cool.

This is the reason that every rainy night at five O'Clock, the entire engineering staff would jump in the car and drive down to the PBofD to watch the changing of the shifts. We'd sit in our darkened cars and watch the little slit of light open as the Poor Chumps slipped out the air-lock. They'd emerge as Orange/Brown mummies. Then they'd come out into the rain and burst into photolumenescence.

It was quite a sight.

After The Project was completed, we burned the PDofD to the ground and sold the frame for two hundred and fifty dollars.