Intel's Ronler Acres Plant

Silicon Forest
If the type is too small, Ctrl+ is your friend

Saturday, September 18, 2010

Ammo Dream

We were on our way to a shooting event of some kind, one of my brothers, I think it was Andy, and I. We came across a military ammunition facility and thinking this might be a good place to score some cheap ammo, we stopped in.

We came across three women taking apart pallet loads of ammo. I asked the one in charge if it might be possible to buy some ammo. She was aghast at the thought of buying it. Her attitude was something like "take a look around you, what do you think we're doing here? Take whatever you need." Wow, such an invitation. They've finished whatever they are doing, so I head into a warehouse.

I come across a stack of boxes of ammo. The boxes are like regular ammo boxes, olive drab metal with watertight lids, but these kind of an odd shape, like 6 inches wide by 2 feet long by 2 inches tall. I open it up. It's hand gun ammo, but not a type I need. It looks like 380 or something similar, though "one half" sticks in my mind. I can't use it, but maybe somebody else at the shoot can, so I start lugging it back to our truck. I meet my brother coming the other way and try to persuade him to take the box back to the truck, but he's having none of it, and goes on by me.

I put the box of ammo on the floor of the cab of our truck and go looking for something we can use. I go back in the warehouse. The warehouses are old dark brick with concrete floors and multiple large rooms. Pallets are stacked neatly one, two, three or more high as you expect to see in a warehouse.

I find stacks of pallets of ammo, but none of it is a caliber I need, so I decide to go back to my original plan and see if I can buy some, so I head for the office. On the way I come across one of the women who was unstacking pallets when I first arrived. She's driving some kind of little pusher, standing up, pushing a long row of carts. She looks absorbed in what she's doing, so I don't bother her. I stay away from this train of carts, and follow her along, as she is going in the same direction as I am.

We get to the "office", which is just a section of the warehouse floor near the back that is given over to desks. The train of carts goes in an aisle right through this office area. There are some people standing there talking so I approach them thinking I might get some answers. The are involved in their conversation and it takes a while to get anyone's attention. One middle aged manager type finally deigns to talk to me and says sure, he can sell me some ammo.

We are outside looking through pallets scattered on the lawn. We are looking for 50 caliber and thirty-ought-six ammo, but we aren't finding any. He has become distracted and is no longer focused on our mission (my mission). A semi-tractor towing a lowboy trailer arrives slightly uphill from us. Some army guys are unloading a pickup truck from the lowboy, but instead of rolling it off the back of the trailer, they tip it over the side. This startles me into moving away as the pickup is going to roll over and crush us. My companion is not concerned. He puts up a hand to stop the truck, which is enough as the hood of the truck has run into a pallet of stuff and stopped the truck from rolling any further. Hard to tell if this was realistic. I suspect in real life the rear end of the truck would have kept coming. But that would depend on the steepness of the hill.

No comments: