Friday, November 04, 2005

Muffin is the Word!

Tonight, I have completed a challenge; the A-Maze-ing Team Challenge. This is a time-honoured tradition of garbage-bag mazes, shooting adversaries with pingpong balls, and memorizing Mr. Potatohead configurations (among other things). And not only did we complete the challenge, we WON the challenge, baby! That's right, undefeated throughout the events, after head to head playoffs, we came out so on top!

As I mentioned, a garbage-bag maze is involved; a more detailed description is necessary, which will now be supplied (to you, my enthralled readers. Heh). The maze is made up of various wooden frames covered in orange plastic mesh (these make the walls). This entire structure is covered in garbage bags, making it basically pitch black inside, and then smoke machines pump smoke in the whole thing, making it even harder to see. The maze is only about four feet high, which means you have to run around in it hunched over. Objects are hidden throughout the maze (at least two teams are going at a time, the objects are colour-coded), that have to be retrieved by team members in the maze (armed with flashlights, thank goodness). In the preliminary round, each person must get one item, in a relay setup. We got the 2nd best time overall in the prelims, which should have warned us we were about to rock the whole thing; after completing the other stations (I'd describe them entirely too if I wasn't sure you'd all just get up and leave if I did), we advanced to semifinals, which were head to head against another team. We won handily, getting ourselves to finals.

Finals were a little different; three objects to retrieve, three flashlights, six people in the maze at once, everyone had to be outside the maze to win. The objects were as follows - a pingpong ball duct taped to the floor, a baton also taped to the floor, and a hockey bag weighing over 100 lbs. As another round was occuring, our team got together to strategize; we decided to stay in pairs (so no one was wandering in the dark). After some more discussion, I came up with the idea that we should have a safety word; if all the objects were found and outside the maze, but team members were still in the maze, those members outside would yell the safety word to let those inside know that they should just get the hell outside. We decided on the word "muffin", for it's distinguishability, and guarded our word closely, so the other team wouldn't hear and use it against us.

Finals start: we all enter the maze, and myself and my partner couldn't find a single one of our items. We found every item that belonged to the other team, but not one of ours. We're running frantically through the maze, trying to find these things, when we hear our team mates yelling "MUFFIN! MUUUUUFFFFFIIINNNN!!!" at the top of their lungs. We were a little lost at this point, but after some handy teamwork between myself and my partner, we were outside, and the CHAMPIONS!!!

Which is why, of course, muffin is the word.

1 comment:

Evi said...

I am jealous! That sounds like so much fun!! And by the way, exellent strategizing!