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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.
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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).
"Take a man to a FIRST contest and he's entertained for three days. Teach a man to build a FIRST robot, and he's out of your hair for six weeks a year..." - kmcclary [more] 
26-06-2004, 00:39
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