"Spare Parts" Rules Are Broken

[dlavery]

We've lost.

It is now official.

The lawyers have won.

The fact that this recent discussion since Update 15 is even taking place illustrates that even a well-intentioned group of engineers and would-be-engineers can never avoid looking for loopholes and ways around the rules. Thus, lawyers are necessary. If this trend continues then we are doomed, as our entire social structure will eventually grind to a halt as we require arbitrators just to discuss grocery lists.

I cannot think of a more blatant example where a ruling from FIRST is about to be bent and perverted in a more irrational manner. It is intuitively obvious that a machine shop made available to teams in support of a competition event would have operating hours limited to the active hours of the event. To even suggest that teams could host a "72-hour machine shop marathon" off site and outside the control of the event is silly. At the close of every day at every event, the pit announcer always makes it clear that teams must put down their tools, stop working on their robots, and take some time off. Why in the world would anyone think that the rules would be any different for a team-provided shop?

And please don't use the "well they never said we couldn't!" excuse! FIRST never explicitly said that I could not bring a Boeing 747 to the event site and put it on display in the center of the play field either. But it is intuitively obvious to even my 4-year-old neighbor that is not acceptable, and would not be allowed. So why are we apparently unable to make the same distinction when it comes to something like this?

OK, so here is the deal - if ANYONE honestly believes that it is now OK to have a team-provided machine shop up and running during the off-hours of the competition event, I will take personal responsibility to work with FIRST to generate a new rules update (#16?) that specifically addresses this issue, and have them will spell out, in excruciating detail, the exact hours (down to the nearest nano-second, as determined by the atomic clocks at the U.S. Naval Observatory) of permitted operation. And we will show that we are incapable of applying common sense to an issue like this. And we will force FIRST back to the position of publishing an encyclopedia of rules every year at the kick-off because we can't be trusted to do the sensible. And we will then all whine about how there are so many rules that it is impossible for the entire team to understand them all, and how we have to fully dedicate one team member just to reading and interpreting the rules and ensuring we are in compliance.

And the lawyers will win.

-dave

p.s. 8am Thursday through 5:00pm Saturday is only 57 hours, not 72.