Rambling

Stark white walls stare back at me. Minutes tick by. The keyboard waits patiently for me.

Paintball is a big part of my life. It’s how I’ve made my living for the better part of 9 years now. Writing is a small part of my life that is relatively new to me. I’m not very good at it and most often refer to it as rambling, rather than writing. I don’t even really know why I write. I’ve never been the artistic type. To be honest, I’d probably be better suited to write technical manuals. Too bad I’m not the technical type either. Maybe I could learn Chinese and translate manuals for large Chinese companies exporting to English speaking countries. God knows they could use some help with that.

Nevertheless, almost a year ago, I started this whole blogging thing and since much of my life these days revolves around running a paintball field, it seemed fitting that I should write about that. But admittedly, after 9 years of running a paintball field that is doing “OK”, the business itself is almost running on auto-pilot. Sure there are always little fires to put out and some minor decisions to make. There is some maintenance involved and even building the odd new structure, or possibly even a field. But after a while, there is very little “new” stuff. It repeats itself. I think that is why, after close to a year of blogging, my writing has become less frequent.

After covering all the basics, how much new stuff is there to write about? Sure, I could write about what others in paintball are doing like other blogs do, but what would be the point? There are already enough people doing that and what would be the fun in doing that? I’ve always considered myself an individual, not a follower, but not really a leader either. I like to be in control of my own life, but I don’t feel the need to lead and control others. At the field, I need to be in control, as the person running the show, but I have a tough time commanding people and demanding effort from my employees. I would rather lead by example and “suggest” things my employees should be doing. Most of the time they take me up on my suggestions, some more than others. Those that do rarely don’t get called in to work very often.

I think it works much better if employees understand why they need to do their jobs in a certain way, rather than being forced to do their jobs in a certain way, without a conscious understanding of why they should do it that way. Since I have a multitude of employees that seem to meet the necessary criteria to do their jobs, it makes it that much simpler for me. Having said all that, a manager of a business, and a manager of the people involved in that business, must never get too relaxed or complacent. A degree of control is necessary.

But I don’t have the drive that some business owners have. I don’t want to open a second location. I don’t want to open a retail outlet. Others would possibly make an effort to build their business up and then sell franchises. Not interested. Maybe I’m just plain old fashioned lazy. I don’t know.

Anyway, the white walls are no longer staring back at me. I’ve rambled and achieved very little in this post and I’m torn between deleting the whole thing and going to bed. But since you are reading this, I obviously have not chosen to do that. I haven’t written anything in a few days, so I’ll post it up just to make it look like I haven’t totally slacked off. If anyone has any topics that an old paintball field operator might shed some light on, let me know. Until then, I’ll just keep rambling every once in a while.