Monster Snaps...

You know those little fireworks that you throw on the ground and they snap. Well do I have a little story to tell.

My supervisor gave me a box of Monster Snaps at work. It was a corporate gift for doing a great job and for working on the 24th, Pioneer day. He told us all not to throw them indoors and we all said ok. That night when I was working the graveyard shift, a guy named Lonnie kept throwing them at me during the dead silence of the night. When you are basically falling asleep at 4am and no one is calling in and there is no sound other than the air conditioning unit running, a snap from a Monster Snap can be quite startling.

I remembered what my supervisor said the next day about not throwing those things in the building. I just was throwing them at the garbage can so that there would be no mess to clean up. After about 5 throws, my supervisor said I don't want to hear another one of those. I said ok. What happened next was not my fault.

Yes, there is a Caution on the side of the box and it says, "USE ONLY UNDER CLOSE ADULT SUPERVISION. FOR OUTDOOR USE ONLY. THROW ON ROUND. NOT RECOMMENDED FOR CHILDREN UNDER 8 YEARS OF AGE. DO NOT PUT IN MOUTH".

I did not read the caution until I had done what I did. The only part of the caution that I did not follow was the outdoor use only caution part. I was inside sitting at my computer. I am an adult and Allen who sits behind me at work is an adult too (we are both over 21 years of age). So I feel that because of what happened did not happen because of lack of adult supervision. And I am above 8 years of age so what happened did not happen because of being underage.

I do feel that they should put a warning on the box that says something like, "Do not unwrap all the Monster Snaps and form one giant Monster Snap Bomb". Yes it is reasonable to think that I should have realized that making one giant Monster Snap might be a bad thing.

So here is what happened. I made one giant Monster Snap. I carefully unwrapped many of those little Snaps and emptied the contents into a piece of paper that I borrowed out of the printer at work. I was showing my friend Allen what I was doing and he just laughed. I was going to take the Big Snap outside so that it would not go off indoors, since my supervisor said that I should not let another one of them go off inside.

Soon little flying rocks shot all over the place, my ears were ringing, Allen was hitting mute on his headphones so that he could say stop that, my supervisor was saying "I said not to throw another one of those", and the smell of burnt paper and Monster Snap smell was filling my cubicle. I really did nothing to set the thing off. All I did was started wrapping the paper around the rocks and it went off. The dang thing blew up in my hand.

So if you were having a hankering to make a Monster Snap bomb at work, don't do it. Your supervisor gets mad and little rocks will probably be in your cubicle for months to come. And from my experience I would actually say that it is dangerous.

So that is my story for the day. I hope you learned something and enjoyed the email.

Steven