Quote:
Originally Posted by Adam Freeman
Anyway, I figure I should put those imperfections out there for everyone to balance all the positive comments...before someone else come on here and states that they have experienced us being elitists in some way.
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I want to jump on the bandwagon a little with Adam here. I know I've said things on competition weekends that I've thought back on and tought to myself, "I wish I handled that differently". Almost always, the situation involves being pressed for time so I say something that in my mind is perfectly logical, but from someone else's perspective that is not in my mind and doesn't see my whole train of thought that lead to that statement, it probably sounds mean/rude/or something else negative.
A great example happened in Detroit last week. I think it was Saturday morning, but it might have been late Friday afternoon. Anyway, a lot of matches have been played by this point.
Our team needed to do an adjustment to the shooter on the practice field between matches. As always, time was tight and the practice field was busy. As soon as we got the adjustment done, the team needed to run to the match queue so I volunteered to clean up at the practice field and return things to the pits (ethernet cables, laptop, etc.).
As I was tidying up, a couple of students from a rookie team came up to me and asked "we're in an upcoming match with you. Can we balance the coopertition bridge?"
I said something like, "so, you're our opponents, right?" (As background, in all of the qulifying matches we've played this year (24 thus far) we've been the designated coop bridge balancer in all but one match. I assumed if someone was coming to us to talk about the coop bridge, it was an opponent.)
One of the students said, "no, we're your partner."
At this point I thought: if they're suggesting that they do the balancing, then they must be really good at it. Afterall, we had balanced successfully in all but one match at that competition. I thought "great - this will allow us to score a little more and balance the team bridge. It will help us get the 4 QPs."
With the above in mind, I said something like. "Cool. How many times have you done it, and how many times were you successful?"
The student then looked a little sheepish and said, "well, this will be the first time. In fact, our robot still hasn't really played yet."
To this I said something like, "Well, in that case, I'm sorry but I'd have to say no. We're ranked in the top 3 right now and the coopertition bridge is a key part of our strategy." And then I think I got up and left.
I can't remember if I said any more to soften the blow or not, but probably not. I remember being in a hurry since the reason I was alone on the practice field was that our team had to rush to the queue for a match and I really didn't want to miss the match. My mind was thinking of many different things at that time, and how to be tactful in a delicate situation was probably well down my mental priority list at that time. Just after it happened, I didn't think much of it. However, later on I thought back to it and I started thinking, "Maybe I didn't say the right things there. Did I come off as a jerk?" Unfortunately, my memory of the situation was a little blurry so there's a good chance I wasn't thinking straight and I didn't handle the situation very well.
Looking back on it, the students probably thought I was one of those veteran team jerks. To be honest, I wouldn't blame them if they thought that. I would like to think that most of the people that know me think I'm a pretty nice guy. But if I get wrapped up in something else while you're trying to get my attention, then I probably may not come off so well.
Unfortunately, you only get one chance to make a first impression. Hopefully, someone on a team gives you a bad first impression, give them another chance. A lot of times someone's mind is off in another place at a competition and they may not be their normal self at that time.
The only saving grace for me with that team is that I was helping them from Friday afternoon through Saturday morning getting parts of their robot working. Although, their team probably thinks I'm two different people. Something like, "Not all of those 51 guys are bad. That guy that helped us get the compressor going was nice - not like that jerk from the practice field that you told me about."
