27th out of 5 million

Last night some friends of Cindy’s stopped by for some chicken training.  While we are on the road trip they are going to be taking care of the hens for us.  They brought their two daughters with, they found the chickens entertaining.  Chicken maintenance training is pretty simple, scoop the poop, swap out the water and food as needed, grab any eggs and move the chicken tractor location every day or two.  Even with it’s simplicity I have concerns leaving the chickens in someone else’s care for 10 days or more.  Even though they are farm animals, Cindy and I care for them like any other pets.  Their well being is important to us obviously.

As I was talking to Darwin, who does all sorts of handyman work and is about 20 years younger than I am, I discovered we had some common ground, video games. He is a HARD CORE Call of Duty player, a very popular first person shooter game.  When the original Call of Duty came out somewhere around 10 years ago I played a good amount of it on my computer with my friends, even participating in organized team matches with my “clan”.  I have played these type of games all the way back to their origination with Wolfenstein, Quake and UnReal.  Despite playing a lot I was never all that great at them, at my best I was only an average player.

Well Darwin plays Call of Duty on the PS3, a gaming console.  I really dislike playing first person shooters on a console, I feel much more comfortable using a keyboard and mouse as opposed to a gaming controller.  Well Darwin is the opposite, he hates playing on a computer but excels playing COD on his Playstation. We wound up having close to a 30 minute conversation about his glory in Call of Duty.

He is the leader of his COD clan and is literally one of the best players in the world.  He said there were currently 5 million ranked players in the game, as of Sunday night he was ranked 27th.  I don’t think you have to like or understand video games to realize how difficult that number is to reach. Of course there is a price to pay for this virtual accomplishment, he plays the game several hours a night.

He isn’t the typical high ranked COD player either, many of which are kids or even adults that don’t work for one reason or another and do nothing but gaming for most of their waking hours.  Darwin works sometimes 7 days a week, maintains their home and tends to their daughters all while maintaining his COD epic-ness.  I need to get the guy into playing some WoW. 😉

Darwin does a lot of general handyman work on the side as well so there is a good chance I could enlist his skills in the future on some project that I don’t feel like undertaking myself.