[Dan 550]

Pit area security is truly bad during the award ceremonies. Last year at Philly (2001) we were all the way down there in 44th place (And those of you that were there will remember that there were 45 teams in attendance. Our bot may have been simple and junky looking, but it was not totally our fault that we got 44th; it was the two matches we had back to back that scored about a dozen points each due to robotic failures on the bridge by other teams that dropped us from 15th to 38th in ten minutes...), so we weren't competing in the finals. We boxed up all our stuff, locked the stuff that didn't fit in the robot crate that we closed up, and walked away. I took the laptop we had and went to watch the remaining matches and the finals, and save all of our pictures to the hard disk and play a little Starcraft. The laptop bag that I left at our pit was mysteriously gone when we got back, stolen. Luckily, only the battery charger and a serial cable were in there, so I didn't lose anything I didn't have an extra one of, but thievery still occurred. One of the teams in a nearby booth lost two laptops, though. Goes to show you what some people will do while they are somewhere they don't belong.