Did You Catch 'Em Being Good?!

[Andy Baker]

Here's a good one:

Lead Robot Inspectors Chris Paulik, Jeff Pahl and Chuck Dickerson (with Chris and Jeff being LRI's on Curie and Archimedes) approached my team (3940) regarding some robot rule non-compliance on Friday. This was after we passed inspection Thursday morning, while I was busy inspecting other robots.

They came up to me after pow-wowing around our robot before a match began. I was on the other side of the field, and wondered why a bunch of yellow hats were around our purple robot. Then, they huddled by themselves for about 2-3 minutes and came over to me.

Chris tried to keep a straight face and told me that our robot was illegal. I asked why this was the case. He said that since our air cylinders were covered with yellow tape and our plastic air tanks were painted purple, we were violating the rule that did not allow this sort of modification, although he knew it was cosmetic. All four of us joked about this for a little bit, agreeing that this is a rule that inconsequential. Then, I said "seriously, are you gonna make us change these tanks and take off the yellow tape?" They said yes, since another inspector on another division made a team do this previously on Thursday, they need to be consistent. Although I did not agree with their interpretation of this rule (or we would not have painted the tanks in the first place), I agreed that they were correct in their enforcement, and proceeded to go back to my team and pose the situation to them.

So, as we were waiting our turn back at a practice field, we took a knife to the yellow gaffers tape on the cylinders and some fingernails to the tape on the plastic tanks. Within about 5 minutes we had all of this rouge stuff off of our pneumatics. Our pit captain, Sarah, when to the Curie question box and asked for the LRI. Chris came over and Sarah talked to him about what we did to fix the problem.

While this was funny, it was also awkward for those inspectors to address me with this issue, since I was also an inspector. They were graceful and correct in their ruling, and understood why I disagreed with their interpretation of the rule. However, they still made us comply. Chris, Jeff, and Chuck were in a bind with this issue, and handled it well.

Andy B.