Your Worst FIRST experience

[Elgin Clock]

Originally Posted by Richomundo

Well FIRST is GREAT i love FIRST but it was my team that sucked. so maybe the thread should be changed to "Every team has had dysfunctions, what was your worst?"

Just be aware - as you already all shoud know - that this is a public forum, and the things written here can be seen by everyone and anyone.

Try not to air out your team's dirty laundry here, unless it is well in the past and you can all laugh about it now.

That said; post away!

[Matt_Kaplan1902]

My worst expirence in FIRST was at this years Midwest Regional. Our team was in the pit area voting on going to the team social or to go around town for the night. There was one student who decides he wants to go into town so he tries to force (literally force) kids into putting their hands down. Enraged I yelled at this person and he proceded to step up to my face. At that moment I felt that we were no longer a team and it saddened me that had to happen in the pit area were all other teams could see what was going on.

[dez250]

Like Elgin said not everythign should be posted here, but instead of just hearing what your worst experience was, lets change this thread a little. If you are going to paost a bad experience you had in FIRST, why dont you also post what you did to correct that problem, and/or what was learned from that situation.

[sanddrag]

Originally Posted by MATT_kaplan108

At that moment I felt that we were no longer a team and it saddened me that had to happen in the pit area were all other teams could see what was going on.

I'm with you on that one. I've done the same thing and had the same thing done to me. Additionally, I have been a spectator to such events. In the pits, often it is easy to forget there are others watching. So nowadays, I remind the team that our individual actions reflect on the team as a whole, whether we want them to or not.

I think the Pit Announcers should make an anouncement like every hour on the hour for people to stay calm, happy, and relaxed. It would do good things for the atmosphere.

As for my bad experiences besides that one, in 2003 I designed the robot frame and the teacher would not let me build it for a whole week until the other subsystems had their designs and dimensiosn finished. I insisted that these frame pieces had nothing to do with the other subsystems. Anyway, after the worst week of arguing in our team's histotry, I the teacher gave up and said fine, go build the frame. So I went and built it. Then he comes and asks what size the outside is. I tell him 35x29, just like the plan. And he comes up with some other plan that says 35.5x29.5; he comes up with the new numbers by counting squares on the graph paper on which this new plan was drawn. Anyway, he tries to make me recut all the pieces for the frame and implied that I would have to pay for the wasted material because I was not following the plan. I insisted that I was correct and the dimensions had been run by all the engineers and subsystems and they were fine. He still kept on that it was not to plan spec. After abotu 3 hours back and forth on that. I finaly just went home in anger. I came back later and recut the frame, hastely because I was pissed off. But I did it because I knew we would get nowhere unless I did.

Now we had a 35.5x29.5 frame, 1 fairly happy teacher, and one very angry student (me), and 1 week wasted.

The reason I can post this whole story is because it has a great ironic ending. At a pre-ship scrimmage, we noticed our low profile robot got lost in the sea of bins. We wanted to add flags which mounted on the outside of the frame rails, but with them and hardware, we were over the size limit. The teacher finally realized the reason I left a good margin of space beneath the limit, and now this year, our frame is 35x29.

Another bad experience was the 2004 LA regional Quarterfinals. But that is not a story I can discuss here much further than saying: I hope it was

I think to counter this thread we should make one called Your BEST FIRST experience (not including winning or awards).

[Richomundo]

Originally Posted by sanddrag

I think the Pit Announcers should make an anouncement like every hour on the hour for people to stay calm, happy, and relaxed. It would do good things for the atmosphere.

I think to counter this thread we should make one called Your BEST FIRST experience (not including winning or awards).

i might get annoyed with the announcement after a full day in the pits... I was going to make this best/worst experience, but i realized that the responses would be way too long.

The good of FIRST outweighs the bad, though, and i hope to recruit a whole bunch of new people for it next year.