Quote:
Originally Posted by The Lucas
A short anecdote: At an early competition, this year a team started installing using their own can burglar arms late in competition (prior to that they had kept them off so they wouldn't get in the way). Many people approached me (an RI) and the rest of the inspection crew about the that team changing their robot without getting reinspected. We told them that yes they did get weighed with those arms and it wasn't really a problem. However, now I think about those countless people that noticed the change but didn't ask a RI for clarification. Are they suspicious that the team was breaking the rules? In absence of any simple tools to gather better info, are they saying things that damage that team's reputation behind their back when that team followed proper procedure? They probably have similar questions about the RIs.
|
I remember thinking it was weird when we were asked to reinspect in the middle of playoffs after we had just reinspected 2 hours prior and hadn't changed anything.
As we've improved, we know that we must endure extra scrutiny, and our recent improvement increases the likelihood that we will be negatively judged for every action we take. Early this year, I made some mistakes in alliance negotiations by being a little forceful and had to tone down my insistence a little. I know not every team has the 'do what it takes to win' (while keeping your GP) paradigm as we do, and us partaking in actions like giving cheesecake hasn't sat well with some others and occasionally builds a negative perception, regardless of how the recipient team feels about it. I remember having negative perceptions of teams back when I was in high school -- 'that team's robot was totally built by mentors because they win all the time', etc, and being jealous of teams for doing particularly well -- and now we fight back that same perception locally. It's been an interesting shift. We're not going to try any less hard to win (if anything, we're going to continue to try even harder), but our awareness of others' perception has been heightened.