Snow days

[techhelpbb]

Originally Posted by Brandon Ha

Once we had a snow "week" that was set on the last week of the build season. We ,as many are, were no wear near complete. Our team has a shaky relationship with our school who provides us with our space and we have a set of keys that our mentors carry that allows us to enter into our section which used to be a classroom/shop/cad room (we had 2 rooms separated). So we did the smart thing. We sneaked into the school and worked on the robot. Afterwards our head talked to the principal and told him what we did. Our team-school relationship has been getting better since.

I applaud your honesty but realistically the schools have very good reason to discourage this. It's a security problem and it does come with actual risk.

It would be better to remove the robot from the school and work on it where the property owner knows what is going on.

I will fully admit that in the distant past I've worked around some issues like this but unlike the situation with the snow it was a political problem. I still feel the goal was to manufacture a failure by shortening the work time arbitrarily or to weaken team members by exhausting our much more limited resources at the time. Whether or not that level of intention and foresight was really involved is subject to interpretation.

These days there is much less risk for this. Several mentors and myself are more than adequately equipped to safely transport the robot and most of the tools offsite. The school has been a great help and if push comes to shove we could load up and roll out. We actually do this for good reason when we transport the robots offsite to our mock field.

I think it's important to recognize that sometimes extraordinary circumstances create extraordinary situations. However I don't want people to think that these deadlines are an excuse to simply ignore the very real concerns of others especially where safety is involved. Then again I should hope that in return for respecting other people's concerns they should respect the often extremely hard work so many people put into FIRST.