Team Outing
Whilst other departments went swimming and rented out presidential suites at posh hotels, one zealous individual in our creative department suggested we shoot each other.
My head has been hit by many things in this lifetime so far; paper planes, footballs, low-hanging branches, you name it — the most painful being a dropped load from a hateful seagull on a beach in Australia with my family when I was 11. The high-velocity dump had been so great that I actually thought my older brother had finally had enough of me and walloped me on the back of the head. For a long time afterwards I remained convinced that it wasn’t the alkaline properties of bird droppings that scratched the paint off cars, but the sheer impact of the stuff. You can imagine my dismay when, as a junior copywriter on a team outing one afternoon, I held a marble-like paintball pellet in my hand for the first time, and realised that grievous bodily harm was a very real possibility.
It was annual review day at our agency, and as such it was tradition for each department to take off at around two in the afternoon and do something fun as a group before the review at five o’clock. Whilst other departments went swimming and rented out presidential suites at posh hotels, one zealous individual in the creative department suggested we shoot each other. As none of us could think of anything better to do (though on a more personal note, morbid curiosity was the deal-breaker for me), we all agreed to go paint-balling.
The sky was overcast and the mood was grim as we pulled up to the park. We watched as the people who worked there ambled around the dimly lit playing field and sucked up the rainwater with vacuum cleaners that sounded like industrial chainsaws. The tension was mounting. After we were given a talk on safety and changed into some rather musty paint-balling kits, we were split into teams the old fashioned way. Unpleasant memories of team picking in PE back at school resurfaced, though for a change I wasn’t the last one on the metaphorical bench — hurrah! A triumph already!
Positioned behind a large inflatable bunker, my job was to cover my more agile teammates, who had to sneak up and nab the flag. We won the first game, which had apparently evoked a certain level of bloodlust in our opponents — particularly in Shy.
Shyala Smith was also a young, female English copywriter at the time, and, being around the same age with similar interests, we were friends. There were only four female creatives at a non-directorial level in our department back then, so we would often seek each other out for advice or feedback. Being in the minority, there was a camaraderie between the four of us, even if we didn’t always see eye-to-eye.
Welp. Not today.
Today, the fellowship would be broken.
Today, Shy held on to just enough ammunition as the rest of her team slaughtered the rest of my team and I, finally being forced into the open after cowering behind the bunker the entire time, was in full view. I scrambled towards the flag. She took aim. And she pulled the trigger. My goggles were instantly splattered by hot pink paint, and my vision was shot. I was dead.
“HA!” Shy crowed as her team took the flag. “I got you in the FACE!”
By some weird magic our team wrested victory from their grip in the third game, and thankfully after that we called it quits. As far as departmental outings go, paintball was probably the most memorable, and is one of the things I miss about working at that agency. There are a lot of things I don’t miss, too, but that’s another story.
