Paintball

Ahhhhhh, the sweet satisfaction of shooting your best friend in the ass while you hunch down behind a rock giggling hysterically as they look for the one who shot them…..

A few months back after an exhaustive amount of organising a friend of mine and I managed to organise a work function to play paintball on a Saturday, I use the term ‘work function’ loosely as all of our immediate friends (work and otherwise were invited) and in the end only about 5 were actually from work and we ended up with a group of around 14 people.

I had never played before but the opportunity to take pot shots at my friends (or anyone else, for that matter) was a very appealing thing for me, not that I don’t like them but I though it sounded like fun.

So I get up at the crack of dawn (in my opinion the clock shouldn’t actually start on a Saturday until around 12) to leave by 7.30am, it is around a one and a half hour drive to the site we are playing at and we are supposed to be there by 9am. I waited for my friend, who was running late (tisk, tisk) and once she arrived we got going.

A relatively uneventful drive got us to the town with the field around 9 and we’re on the road leading there, now picture this, we come to an intersection, one way is tar sealed, the other a dirt road. Our turn? You guessed it, the dirt road. It didn’t look too bad for the first hundred meters or so but then it turned into a four wheeled drive extravaganza. My car is a relatively boring, ordinary sedan, but if I drive it super slow it seems to be doing ok on the river bed/cliff face that is trying to convince us that it is indeed a road. By this time I have caught up to a few other friends who are also on the Death Valley road. The one directly in front of me was driving his recently purchased sports car and it was just plane ugly to watch him driving along here. But we all made it through without event.

So we’re finally at the field. We are told to get some overalls from the bags supplied and go and line up for our pellets and our gun, face mask and ladies your (you guessed it) chest protector – heaven forbid you take one to the chest. In retrospect I shouldn’t mock this because one of the girls did take one to the chest (without the protector) and she was still whinging about it over a week later. The scary thing is one of the guys brought his own cammo’s (a seasoned player, I was told – I prefer to think of him as a tosser) and one of my friends used to play as a school sport (and I had been warned he was very good).

Now I was going to skip ahead but I just wanted to share the concept of overalls with you, these are not the easiest things to put on, especially when you have 10 men ogling at you as you try to duck down behind one of the parked cars – they pretend not to look, but they are! One of my friends picks me up a small pair and tosses it over, I take one look at the fit (which I think was made for a ten year old boy) and ask her for a bigger pair. All these overalls are (very) obviously made for men, no room for hips or boobs (especially with the chest protectors) but after I manage to crush my femineity into the straight up and down overalls and get one of my (girl) friends help me pull them up over my shoulders (with the crotch riding quite high) and finally zip them up, it’s on, commando style.

So geared up, my 500 pellets at the ready (ok, so they were in a baggy on the side of the field and the only ones on me where in my gun which was loaded to capacity). We go through a lecture on safety. No shooting anyone closer than 5 meters, always put your guns down barrel up, if you get shot go off the field immediately, if you’re having problems stand up straight and hold your gun above your head and a ref will come to you, blah, blah, blah.

So now it’s time for the first game, incidentally by this time it is close to 11am. So we are split into teams and by some shear force of luck I have both the tosser and schoolboy players on my team. So the first game my gun broke, I threw a hissy fit and stormed off to the man to fix it, he took his sweet ass time to do so, but he remade my gun refilled my pellets and around 15 minutes later sent me on my merry way. I had missed the rest of the first game (bugger!). But on with the show……. the second game I was like a sniper, well a sniper actually hits people right? Ok, I was like a crazed madman, shooting here and there, but not actually hitting anything, although my gun after its repair had fantastic distance. I am covering someone else who is trying to creep up through the grass and then I hear a splotch sound a see orange paint start to run down my goggles. I have been popped off by some bastard who sneaked around behind me when I wasn’t looking, oh well off the field I go.

So after a few more games we stop for lunch then back into the fray. Now I am fully aware that I am not the fittest person in the world but I didn’t think I was too bad. For our next adventure we are going up the mountain, to play in the relative bunkers dotted up the mountain side, they send our team and then the other team comes a few minutes later and tries to make it to the top. So off my team heads and I am refilling my gun, yep now it’s done, shit now I almost have to run to catch up, now I get about 20 meters up the relatively steep incline to realise that I am probably the unfittest person on the planet, I am starting to break into a sweat and I have started to puff ALREADY. So I slowly walk/crawl up a few meters further to a bunker and fall in. But now I am in position to shoot anyone coming my way. No one made it to the top but I don’t think I was responsible for putting anyone down, that said I didn’t get shot either.

Now for an old abandoned house. One team is stationed inside and tries to keep the other team out. I hooked up with one of my team members and we belly crawled across to the hedge close to the house, only to be spotted by at least 3 of the other team. We were back to back and pellets were flying left right and centre, we managed to hold out for a few minutes but eventually we were both hit (and off the field we go).

Now the final game (finally, I hear you say!). This game was back on the first field, which was just piles of tyres all over the place, it began as team against team, but ended in a free for all. When this was called I had Mr Schoolboy standing almost directly behind me, he turned and ran the appropriate 5 meter distance and shot me in the back (bastard)! This made me run to the side - people at this stage were going everywhere to avoid this kind of thing happening to them too. I managed to cower down behind a tree and shoot my remaining bullets at whoever I saw, but in all honesty I’m not sure that any of my 500 pellets actually hit pay dirt. But I had managed to get hit 3 times and had some pretty impressive bruises to show.