Critical and picky - here I go again.

[Mark Pettit]

At L.A., the inspector that was going over our robot was incessantly telling us what was wrong with our machine. He would point at a part and tell us how we should have done it instead. We all kind of knodded and umm-hmm'd at him in agreement so as not to upset him and keep him from passing us on inspection but when we got back to our pit we all commented on what a jerk he was about it since our robot works just fine, thank you. Especially since none of us believed that he could build one better.
Our bitterness escalated all the more when we saw that he was actually a mentor for one of the local L.A. teams.
Yes, Andy, et al., I agree! We should all be in awe of each others' creations and we should all see them as the personal objects that they are to each of us who have put so much into them.
My team is constantly telling ourselves that, "If we had more time, we could have done this. . . " or "Wow! That part would have been better if we would have built it this way. . . ". We respect other teams creations and would never think about telling them how they should have done it.