About My Certifications

I get a weird reaction out of people when I show them my certifications for paintball. I guess they a) never considered that there might be something like certifications for paintball, b) can't figure out why certification would be a good thing, and/or c) can't fathom why someone not working in the paintball industry would spend their own money and spare time to get certified. I also suppose people who know more about my attitude towards technology certifications[0] probably consider my having paintball certs a bit ironic. I find it kind of ironic myself.

But my reasoning for getting paintball certs boils down to two major things. well...OK, three things:

• I'm a geek—I can't really help it. /me shrugs It's a gift.
• Safety. I wanted to understand all the safety issues and get the technical details and know-how so that I could be safe. Again, as a geek, I like to control my own destiny.

Paintball is safe—one of the safer sports out there, in fact. The biggest danger is spraining your ankle or scraping your knees/elbows via a hard-charging playing style.

However, and it's a fairly big "however", paintball involves high pressure gasses. As one skeptical scuba tech said to me, "You guys are crazy, running around out there with a bomb under your arm." High pressure gas is dangerous, and a lot of folks in the paintball business don't really pay enough attention to safety as far as I am concerned. There are plenty of places that I am fine going to, because I know how to stay out of the way of potential trouble as far as safety goes. But, I wouldn't take kids to these places or recommend them to beginners.

• I want to run a paintball business in the future.

And, yes, I paid for all my paintball training myself. I've never worked for a paintball business, unless you count the comp'd food/beverages/game entrance fees for working scenario games as a ref (I don't—~$60 in comps hardly seems like a "wage" when you end up working close to 20 hours in 100+F heat.) I'm still considering training for other refereeing certifications, as the organization sponsoring my cert no longer runs tournaments as far as I am aware.

[0] In spite of 10+ years in IT, I have no certifications. For the most part, in my opinion, there are only a handful of certifications that are worth the paper on which they are printed.