Life in a Game! by Enemy Crab Productions

By Kent Steichman
Investigative Reporter

So, tell me if this has ever happened to you: You're minding your own business, finishing up those last few TPS reports, when all of a sudden some otherwise well-meaning vigilante, secret agent, or superhero comes running through your office, and you find your surroundings suddenly exploding all around you.

So not only is your office now a wreck, but whatever you were working on went up in a ball of fire when a stray shot hit your work desk, including your desk and chair. But why does everything explode? This is the question I sought to answer, and my inquiries took me all the way to Russia.

First, I checked one of the nation's leading users of exploding furniture, dataDyne industries. CEO Cassandra DeVries, however, was not available to speak, the strange tall, blond man in a trench coat informed me when I tried to schedule a meeting. When I told him I simply wanted to know where they got their supplies, he directed me to one of their sales associates.

The woman I then spoke to told me they got their office supplies cheap by buying surplus goods that nobody else would buy, which surprised me more than it should have. Exploding desks can't really be a premium item, after all. I asked her if she knew why they exploded, but she said she had no idea. During our conversation, she mentioned she was due to get a new desk, which probably explained why she was so careful getting into and out of her chair.

She gave me the name of the supplier, which led me to an old warehouse in Severnaya. While looking around, I met an old Red Army officer who displayed burns on one side of his face from, as he put it, "A goddamn box just went off on me."

We toured the warehouse, and he finally explained just why everything seems to be combustible. Back during the cold war, when supplies were low, one multipurpose factory had, by way of a shipping mix up, received dozens of barrels of nitroglycerin instead of the petroleum they needed to put into plastics.

Since waiting for the appropriate materials to come would have taken too long, they simply used the nitro in place of the petroleum, which proved to be fairly stable unless exactly four bullets hit one of the items made.

The surviving items, ranging from packing boxes to crates to desks, televisions and radios, were sold and shipped throughout the Soviet Union and even to the United States. Sadly, there's no way to tell just which office supplies will explode or not, so unless you're sure, whatever you do, for God's sake never take cover behind a desk. That's just asking for trouble.

Labels: curley, humor, vg reporter