A plea for a quieter pit area

[Carolyn_Grace]

Originally Posted by wilsonmw04

couldn't that be said for any noise making safety device (horns, sirens or what not)? By your logic, anything that makes noise or flashes a light on a regular basis is a safety hazard.

Safety experts are telling us to do it. I'm not sure why this practice is a bad thing. It's might be a tad annoying for some, but I'd rather have a few rolled eyes in my general direction than having to pull someone off the floor because they just ran into my team's robot on the way to queuing.

I disagree with your logic here. Noise making safety devices are often designed to emit an irritating noise that you can't ignore. Whereas, a regular human voice yelling the same word over and over again can become something that you just don't notice after a while...it just becomes part of the "white noise" around you.

Also, a noisemaker doesn't go off every ten seconds, to a point where you can start ignoring it. Usually when a safety alarm goes off, it's not something that you are used to. Like fire alarms, tornado warnings, a truck backing up...it is an out of the ordinary noise. But when someone yells "Robot, Robot, ROBOT" over and over again, it becomes an ordinary noise, something that you stop noticing.

The safety advisors are only human. And in my experience they often are not correct on some of the "Safe Methods" that they tell teams to follow. For example: telling our team that it's not safe to have sandwich wrappers on our toolbox and not allowing there to be bottled water in the pit area because it could cause a fire if spilled on a robot. (Hello, Disney Championship days of robots getting RAINED on).

I don't think the point of yelling "ROBOT" is to keep people from running in to robots...robots are pretty big and hard to miss. I think people are yelling "ROBOT" is so that they can push their way through people blocking their paths. What this thread is trying to point out is that it is much more effective to have someone walk in front of your robot and *politely* ask nicely, "Excuse me, may we get by with our robot?" Or "Excuse me, we have to get to our match."