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Originally Posted by cavegirl47
My team went to the kickoff in San Jose yesterday, and because we are full of questions about the game, we stayed for a few minutes after the Q&A portion of the kickoff to ask some extra questions. When we got to the kit pick-up area, we were told that we were the last team to get their kit. And, lucky us, FIRST messed up and didn't ship the black box with the rest of our kit. At the earliest, we will get the box on Thursday, because they don't even go back to work until Monday.
Does it seem fair that we are missing a large part of our kit, when we traveled 3 1/2 hours to San Jose to get it, and while we won't get it until late next week, FIRST will not extend the ship date? I know there are other teams that won't even get their kits until next week because they didn't go to a kickoff, but it's their choice to wait. We were there to get ours; it's a mess-up on FIRST's part that we are missing half of our kit.
Thanks if you choose to voice your opinion on this.
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I know that more than a few teams did not "choose" to not go to a kickoff; rather, they weren't able to make it because of weather. It was snowing here to the point where we couldn't see the lane lines on the streets or the freeway; that was a relatively minor storm and other parts of the country received much worse weather.
We can't blame FIRST for the weather, though. Those teams still have to contend with the same ship date as the rest of us.
FIRST made a mistake in your case, and they've made mistakes for other teams as well. I can also understand the anger that you seem to be feeling, as would most of us here.
Still...
Isn't FIRST meant to represent a microcosm of the real engineering world? Things go wrong in real life all the time. Part orders are botched or misdirected. Projects that people have spent months or years of their lives on are cancelled. It seems appropriate that FIRST includes some of that, even if it's not intentional.
A few days is a relatively minor inconvenience. You'll get the bin soon enough, and it's going to make your team look even better if you can still perform well in competition. Isn't there anything else you can do for those few days, like planning or working on other parts of the robot?
No, it's not fair. But neither is life.