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Originally Posted by TeknoBramha
Well my worst experience in FIRST was during the build season when our team advisor(WayneC) got a stroke. It was hard to manage but when a team is a team, anything is possible. So we got thru the Build season with the HUGE load of problems, we survived  |
i have to agree with Bharat here, this the early part of this season were some of the team's darkest hours, mainly because of Cokeley's stroke, but him not being there also had a bad effect on the team's operation. I think we handled it fairly well, but it still hurt us a lot. When Cokeley was incapacitated, it really emphasized how important he is to the team, and how much he does for all of us. He's really an amazing guy. He is so dedicated to our team. He got hospital leave, after some convincing, and attended the New Jersey Regional
ALL THREE DAYS with a walker and an eyepatch. All the shifts in command caused problems that surfaced later, and Mr. C handled them as best anyone could. If you're in need of a role model, talk to Wayne Cokeley.
aside from that, i think my worste FIRST experience, at least at the time, was in the 2002 Nationals when I temporarily lost my job as "Battery Mike." We were ziptying the battery plugs into the plug on the robot because they would come out sometimes. There was one battery in particular, #2, where the cord was very short, and it had always worried me. It was my job to change the batteries and ziptie the plugs so they could not possibly come out. Well, in one of the qualification rounds something went wrong. I used battery #2. It had been fine in other rounds, but this time I messed up. The robot lost power the instant it started. I was accused of not tightening the ziptie and fired as battery boy. It was a mystery to me, at first, how this had happened, but over time i figured out the whole chain of events based on other experiences and careful thinking. The battery cord was short - when I put that battery in I usually had to put hard to get it to click. That time I didn't realize it was the #2 battery and didn't push hard enough - it was never fully in. When I ziptied it, I didn't tighten the ziptie as much as I should have. With this little bit of extra space, the plug had enough room to pull out more, and the metal stopped touching, causing complete power loss to the robot. There were some other stories going around as to how it happened. Somebody told me that a member of the drive team had changed the battery after I left and done it wrong. Whatever the error, I was just glad when it was all over. Our head engineer, Mike Lubniewski (the guy TeknoBrahma claims to be) came over and apologized to me, and told me I could be the battery boy again. I finished up the season as battery boy, and was officially named "Battery
Man" by Big Mike.