[sanddrag]

I agree with Dave Brinza here. I had absolutely no intentions being an inspector friday morning, but I got dragged into it anyway because HALF the teams had not passed. I don't mean to be harsh here, I was pulled away from my own team, of which I am a key member, to help teams who appear to have little knowledge of even some of the most basic rules.

Inspecting with Dave was great, but the situation in the pits was horrible. Since when is it acceptable to ship a crate full of parts, none of which resembe a finished robot? FIRST needs to do something to really amphasize the need to get inspected sooner rather than later. We know all the teams paid a lot of money to be here, and we don't want them to miss matches. But we aren't going to let you play, if you have not passed inspection, IN FULL. Why do so many teams not understand this? Why are so many teams so cal about missign matches? You could argue missing a match is like throwing away a couple hundred dollars! They spend 6 weeks and all this money building their robots, and put themselves in jeopardy of not being able to use it at all. Also, this puts the inspectors in a bad position because we want you to play, we really do, but when you show up at the event with stuiff that is so easily recognizable and spelled out in the rules as illegal, and you are missing the stuff that is required to be legal, what are we supposed to do?

If FIRST is listening, there needs to be some rule making it the team's resonsibility to get their robot inspected. Not the inspectors'. I would go to teams every 15 minutes, to see if there was anything I could check off, and they had so many people around the robot that I couldn't even see a sharp edge if there was one.

Back in 2002, teams actually shipped finished robots. Beleive me teams, on ship date, if your robot doesn't work, that is okay. But PLEASE make sure it is complete, and legal. Pass inspection on what you've got, then fix it, then get reinspected if you made a major change.