-When you eagarly anticipate the time your coatch goes insane because it's funny.
-There's two parts to your life: robotics & homework.
-It's the day after the kick-off and you're already thinking about next year's play.
-You have nightmares of Dave Lavery describing how bins can't go under the bar.
-You scream at your computer, "HA! Take that Technocats!"
-Other people understand your gibberish.

-You can no longer distinguish between night and day,
-All your clothes are either stained with grease or burnt because you just couldn't wait for the part to cool before trying to carry it to the work area
-Day one classes consist of: spare (robot time), skip math (robot time), lunch (robot time), skip chemistry (robot time), Fluid power (robot time), after school meeting (robot time)
-You have nothing better to do than see if your bot can pull a car or two
-Teachers think that you are on drugs because you are always dazed from breathing welding fumes.
-Your average has dropped 10% since january
-You are afraid to go home because the robot will get angry and try to bite (pinch, gouge, cut, lacerate, incinerate) you.
-Styx is now your favourite band
-You have developed the condition know as Black Thumb, no matter how hard you try, you can't scrub the grease off your hands.
-You are now the robot, and it (the robot) controls your life

You are on a first name basis with Home Depot and OSH.

You never want to hear the sentence "I watch Battlebots" again when explaning what FIRST is.

All the local police officers know about FIRST after they thought the lights on in your building at 3AM was slightly suspicious and in the process of checking the place out got a 10 minute lecture on what FIRST is.

You dont update your lj more than once every week during build season and when you do, its only about FIRST.

you make your robot your valentine; buy it some candy
then notice it can't eat it; eat it your self; feel bad; and
get it a card promising to 'make it up to it'

...er.. i mean, i've never done that...:yikes:

-you know your addicted when....you read this whole thread and have done every single one of these things...lol

When there is a fancy party with great food and you only go to it for 5 minutes to get more caffine and get back to work on your robot.

You haven't even been to one of your classes this semester

You not only read all the posts here but are annoyed with how many times reading all the posts has shown up.

You know how to fix parts better than the engineers.

You spend more time working on the robot than at home or in school, and still work a part time job.

When you feel very refreshed when you actually get more than 5 hours of sleep.

When you average 3 hours of sleep per night for 6 weeks straight...

When you take previous years robots to school and see what you can make them do... (on one occasion, using the control system and optical sensors, i created a refrigerator alarm, once the fridge was opened, a motor drove it closed again, unless the proper sequence of buttons was pressed on a control pad off to the side. on another occasion, i created a remote controled tripod camera, capable of driving itself, panning, tilting, and zooming.)

When you hug your robot on a regular basis.

When you inhale enough aluminum to increase your body mass by a pound.

When you come home at one and think it's ok
When you live breathe and eat FIRST
When you haven't cleaned you're apartment in a week because you have been builidng
When you dream about FIRST
When it's allover and you can't remember what it was that you did with your time before FIRST
When you go to college and and can still say that you are on a robotics team

You know the alarm code for your school
You tear apart your school library, set up the ramp, and then tear it down and set it back up
You have a stack of pre-signed passes out of class
You know the local paper reporters by name
You can cite specific rules, and can find anything in the FIRST manual in a minute
When people on your team are dissapointed/worried that you don't know something about FIRST when they ask you
When your family minivan is known as the "official robot transport vehicle"
When you decide, instead of looking for a janitor with keys, to take the school tunnel storage doors off their hinges
When you average over 4 late nite Taco Bell runs a week

- You are still on the team even though you are in University
- You leave a calculus midterm early so you can catch the train to get back to the shop to do work
- You get kicked out of the university microcomputer lab for working on bot code
- You get kicked out of a pratical lab class for working on bot code during it
- You speak in P-basic
- The bot puts a foot hole in the wall and you are more worried about the bot than the wall.
- The bot runs over your foot in autonomous mode during testing, and you are more worried about the bot than your foot
- You work for a week straight before the kickoff so you dont have as much work to do for 6 weeks.
- You are the donation from your company.
- You are encouraging someone to drive down from Toronto to Houstan on a home-made cross between a moped and motorcycle with several two-fours of Canadian beer, and covered in First team stickers. (GO HICKSON!)
- You take a trip through the Universities wind tunnel to make it to the train station on time.
- You try to sneak past your significant other to work on the bot. (She found me in the train station on the wayto the shop from school)
- You start to shake when someone says "The fridge is out of colas"
- More of your notes for the last term have been written by someone else than you.
- The only thing that is keeping you awake is caffiene and sugar and force of will to finish the bot.
- You come up with more ideas for Seanny Dont.
- You think being shipped with your robot is a viable way of getting to the competition if you cant afford airfare. (Our crate can fit 10 people without cramming, we have proof)
- Your bot has speed holes, a speed dent, and speed grease.

Azash
"Call me Zashy and you die."

-Time is no longer measured in seconds, minutes, and hours, but rather how many bottles of Mountain Dew are required to keep you up that long

-If you expierence withdrawl symptoms when away from machine oil for more than 3 hours.

- Your parents just hand you the keys and the cell phone when you walk in the door...

-The security guards consider your bot as top secret as anything else in there

-The security guards recognize all the team members, and know the rules to the game

-You find away to apply everything you're learning to robotics (Newton's Law of Cooling anyone? Hmm, those motors get toasty...)

-people stop asking you where you've been... they already know.

-You pray for a snow day, not because you want to stay home, but because you want to work on the bot.

-You think your bot has a personality

-You think that your programmer could probably put one in.

-You say "disunkill that robot" and everyone understands.
-If they don't, you merely specify "hardware," "software," or "physical," and then they do.
-You are suprised about whether you see the sun or the moon when you walk outside.
-You wake up and realize that you have been writing code in your sleep.
-You are pissed off that Rob Bayer is in High School.

You know your're addicted...
 

...when you sneaked out of the house and helped
transport robots, tool boxes, ramps and platforms
around the city in the middle of the night.



:D

--when your parents invite you home for dinner every night and you politely decline... every night

- You have not seen your house in the daylight since the beginnig of the semester (yes, I have done this one)
- Sleep is a luxury item, caffiene is a necissety
- You find out from experience that the body can go indefinately without sleep, it is the mind that needs it. They only last 72 hours
- You refer to the manual as the 'bible'
- The folks at the burger joint know the team so well that you just need to tell them "I want the usual"
- When your team resorts to having races to see who can take apart and re-assemble the entire drive system to keep from going insane
- You stay up at night coming up with new and better algorithms for the autonomous mode
- You know the folks at Home Depot on a first name basis
- You would kinn for a chance to meet the Dean man

More to come, I'm sure....Happy ship day eve :)

Bill B.