Terrible Volunteer Experience

At every regional I've ever been to (so far 2 different ones, so not a wide variety), the safety glasses people do three things:

1) Hand out safety glasses to anyone who needs them (they shove them in your face)

2) Enforce safety like they were getting paid for it (and they were volunteers)

3) Give people (teams and visitors) safety advice and dafety memorabilia given by a local team.


Never once have I found an unpleasant safety glasses distributor , so this is a shock. I don't know where FIRST gets their volunteers for championships, but it seems like they may need to do a bit more screening than normal (maybe have FIRST alum do the jobs that involve human-interaction. If anyone we know more about what's going on). Our CA regional-level safety glasses distributors are great people, and the people at champs should be 10 times that.

I'm sorry that you had to go through that. While champs can be stressful, I see nothing stress-inducing about handing out safety glasses.

Of course we don't know the whole story (maybe she found out her team lost a match), so we can't make accusations that this person isn't fit to volunteer. I do think, however, that FIRST should be more careful as to who they have volunteering where.

Just my opinions.