By Tim Binnall
An overnight shift at a french fry factory in New Zealand came to a sudden stop when workers discovered a WWII-era grenade among the thousands of potatoes set for processing. The surprising find reportedly occurred last Tuesday morning as Richard Teurukura was inspecting a massive shipment of 100,000 spuds that had just been delivered to a Mr Chips facility in the community of East Tāmaki. The eagle-eyed employee initially assumed that he had simply spotted an oddly shaped stone that had gotten mixed in with the potatoes, but soon realized that it was something far stranger.
When Teurukura wiped some mud from around the 'stone,' he noticed that it sported what appeared to be uniform grooves and began to wonder if it was actually a grenade. Seeking a second opinion for what he thought was a rather fantastic possibility, he turned to a coworker who happens to be a big fan of "war movies" and they subsequently confirmed his suspicions. The workers proceeded to remove the grenade from the sea of spuds, placed it in a cordoned off area of the factory, and called in the local bomb squad to handle the strange situation.
Shortly thereafter, authorities arrived on the scene and determined that the grenade was a type of British-made ordinance known as a 'Mills bomb' which was often utilized in battle during the first and second world wars. Fortunately, the decades-old device had long since gone inert and, as such, posed no danger to anyone in the factory. Be that as it may, Teurukura's supervisor credited him with "keeping his cool about the whole thing," while noting that this was the first time that a grenade had ever been found in the three decades that the facility had been in operation.