A plea for a quieter pit area

[EricH]

Find the head safety advisor (my dad might know who that is at L.A.) and ask him. If it comes from higher up, find out who--and make sure to write them a very nice letter explaining that because they are telling everybody to do this, everybody else is going deaf due to the increased noise level, which means that they can't hear stuff that's more dangerous than a robot, say, a forklift in their workplace. If it's from the head safety advisor, see the contents of the letter I mentioned above, and ask if they have a noise monitor in the pit area or that can be transferred over to the pit area. IIRC, someone brought this up for the competition area a year or two ago, and decibel meters were brought to some competitions to check, with results that said "some areas are too loud, we need to fix this".

You could also, when the Safety Advisors instruct you to yell "Robot", do exactly what they say--as loud as possible, near their ears. They may quickly see the noise contribution that yelling robot makes to the buzz of robot motors, the machine shop, hand/cordless tools, conversations...