[mathking]

I would like to echo the comments about keeping the tone gracious and professional, which has been the case so far. It is easy to come across as whining and angry or sanctimonious and smug without really meaning to.

As for the ship date, as many people have said, the practicality of extending the date more than a day or two is not high. They have to get the crates out to the early regionals and there is not a lot of time for that. So I completely understand the argument of not extending the deadline. (Though looking at the long range forecasts for the midwest, FedEx may not be able to do pickups in a lot of places next Tuesday.)

That said, I also don't think it would be a tremendous hardship to extend the ship deadline by one or two days. It is true that deadlines are important, but in the "real world" they are missed nearly as much as they are made. We might even get a lesson in gracious professionalism out of it by asking teams who have not missed any time to ship Tuesday and letting other teams ship Wednesday or Thursday, all on the honor system. The idea of giving teams who had undergone hardships with the weather (or the team that had their work space flooded by sprinklers) some extra time to work on the robots at the regional competitions has merit too. After all, the problem with the carrier plates for the BaneBots transmissions caused FIRST to change the rules, which I think was a good decision.

Above all, everyone have fun these last couple of days. Remember we do this for a lot of reasons, but one is that it is a LOT of fun!

Good Luck from the Bad Robots!

PS- Team 963, I know you guys have had problems with the temporary change in buildings, the cold days, the snow days, the too few bus driver days...my wife teaches in CPS and my kids attend CPS. I actually live just a couple of blocks from the old (and future) East HS. If there is anything 1014 can do to help this weekend send me a message and we'll try.