Weaponry sales

One of the weirder episodes of my life was when I went into weapons sales.

No, not quite like that, I wasn't shipping tanks off to Ethiopia and places like that. Rather, it was at the end of communism and I was working in Russia. The military factories there, given the end of the Soviet military altogether, were simply lost. Didn't have any orders, weren't getting any money: but given the way the old system rumbled on for a few years, they were still getting raw materials.

This led to some pretty strange decisions by certain factories: there was one that used their plastic injection moulding machines to make sex toys. Didn't work very well as they didn't really know all that well what sex toys were. I didn't get involved with them but I did with the guys making night sights. It was extremely frustrating actually: there was more money to be made (by everyone) by simply taking the germanium metal they were using and selling that. They got it at such a subsidised price that the profit was larger doing that than actually making a night sight.

We got that fixed though and ended up shipping quite a few off to various places. Then, of course, everyone started tightening up on the rules and we ended up in a morass of paperwork so bad that the entire business just wasn't worth the while.

The whole experience made me rather jealous of people doing the same sort of work in the US. Those Second Amendment protections mean that they simply don't face the same sort of problems. They can ship ar 15 accessories, m4 accessories, these sorts of things, as they please and to whom they wish.

All just so much easier, you know?