It started out innocent enough… testing my marker to make sure it worked right.  I was having trouble with it last time I had it out, so I wanted to know if I needed to work on it before next week’s game.  I dumped a pod of balls with no issues, so I figured it looked good.

I shut off the air and headed inside.  As I was walking through the house, I decided to “de-pressurize” the marker by pulling the trigger a few times, a common practice to save your tank o-ring. 

I guess it had been a while since I had done something REALLY stupid, so my time was up.  I failed to completely empty the hopper outside, and now I PLANTED a paintball in the carpet!  That would have been bad enough, but (as paintballs do) it burst and splattered all over the place.  Little droplets of gooey, pink paint in the carpet, doors, floor, walls, ceiling, and on the pictures hanging on the wall.

The doors are painted with enamel, no problem wiping that up.  Linoleum floor, no problem.  The carpet cleaner did a good job on all the little droplets, but the direct impact point will be pink forever.  Flat wall paint, no chance of cleaning that up either, it just happily absorbs whatever pigment you put on it next.  Here are some of the pre-cleanup pictures. 

I think I will go back to my gun safety rules:  “never shoot at something you don’t want to shoot” isn’t that one of them?   Or maybe it was mom, “take that outside!”  Either works in this case.