Your Worst FIRST experience

[akaria]

My worst FIRST experience had to be the VCU Reginal this year on the second night. The two other people in my room got really really sick, just like alot of other people there (if you were there you know what i'm talking about) and i had to nurse two very very sick people, untill my mom showed up ^_^, and my room reeked of puke the entire night gag hack

[Peter Matteson]

I'll just say being a young mentor who gets mistaken for a student leads to frustration in occasions when some one needs to talk to an adult and doesn't believe how old you are. There three of us on my team 24, 24, and 25 who had to deal with this at three competitions.

[Andy Baker]

I gotta say that my worst FIRST experience was in 2003, when myself and a TechnoKat teacher were responsible for not getting our robot to the Pittsburgh Regional. We both messed up with coordinating the shipping from the St. Louis Regional from the prior weekend.

It ended up getting there on Friday.

To make matters worse, we had to re-wire the drive base when it finally got there. Our first 5 alliance partners were not happy.

The silver lining to the could was that we spent all day Thursday helping other teams.

Andy B.

[Steve W]

Originally Posted by Andy Baker

I gotta say that my worst FIRST experience was in 2003, when myself and a TechnoKat teacher were responsible for not getting our robot to the Pittsburgh Regional. We both messed up with coordinating the shipping from the St. Louis Regional from the prior weekend.

It ended up getting there on Friday.

To make matters worse, we had to re-wire the drive base when it finally got there. Our first 5 alliance partners were not happy.

The silver lining to the could was that we spent all day Thursday helping other teams.

Andy B.

And to think that we felt sorry for you. You must admit that a lot of teams were pulling for you even if they weren't your partners.

[Adam Y.]

Originally Posted by Dzdconfusd

I'll just say being a young mentor who gets mistaken for a student leads to frustration in occasions when some one needs to talk to an adult and doesn't believe how old you are. There three of us on my team 24, 24, and 25 who had to deal with this at three competitions.

This is unrelated to first but it sure is a lot better than being mistaken for a fifty year old person while only being eighteen. Of course it was at a funeral but still I dont look that old. I have had very little bad experiences in First. Though the worst has to be the feeling of nervousness whenever we use the robot. Its like giving birth to a baby. I don't care about winning I just want the dam thing to work. Though I feel really dumb for not thinking of using ripstop nylon. It is soo much lighter than the fabric we used on our robot.

[Alex Salomonsky]

I have another stupid freshmen experience that caused me much pain. We were showcasing the bot to a bunch of 8th graders having a shadow day at our school (When kids follow a high schooler for the day to look at the school, in case someone didn't know), well one of the freshmen on the team, who had no business there, found out we were showing it to the 8th graders, came to the room (none of us saw him) and said something stupid like "and we have neat joysticks," what the idiot didn't see was that the bot was on and operational, and I was in front of the bot explaining that once we file the front and put bumpers on, it will be finished. Maybe we should have turned the bot off, but no one was near the controller so we didnt bother. Well the idiot said his remark and pushed forward on the joystick, and "bam." I took a robot ram into my shin. Man, that hurt worse then the drop on my foot the year earlier, plus this time i was bleeding. He was lucky that I'm a nice, and patient guy, and the fact that assualt and battery is a criminal charge, otherwise, I'd release a lot of anger on his ugly face.

As you can tell, I take a lot of punishment from people's mistakes, we have a car wash next saturday, hopefully someone doesn't knock me into on-coming traffic.

[OneAngryDaisy]

My worst experience would probably be this past year's regional.. (that is, our first regional)- we also had a bad scales misfortune.. When we shipped we figured we might be 5 pounds overweight, but at our first regional we weighed in over 15 pounds heavy. What makes it worse is all morning long our pit crew had waited around the pits because our controller wasn't working (we practically owned teh innovation FIRST guy all day long)- we went through countless wiring changes and board changes until it was determined something wasn't updated (I myself never got involved with electrics) Anyway, the inspectors asked to weigh our robot midday just for inspection, and we found out we were over 145 pounds. By then it was around 7:15, and pits closed in 45 mins... most of the other teams were gone by then, so we had massive space to work. It was an incredible team effort, and even the 'spirit' kids were spotted drilling out wheels. We rushed to the weighing station, at around 7:57 and weighed in at 129.8.

Next morning we come in and promptly go to weigh again. 130.1... we somehow gained .3 pounds overnight, so some more drilling and removing of parts occured.. To make it worse, we didn't move in our first few matches thanks to the same board issues, and our first 5 matches were useless. I've never seen our team be that down, ever, it was truly depressing. All we wanted was a fresh start at our 2nd regional, and we did improve there being selected 5th...

from the down low to the top (losing 15) to the down low wasnt easy. especially for a 5th year team who had NEVER experienced anything like this..

I dont want to get into detail here but...

My worst experience was trying to deal with a disgruntled team member, who was kicked off the team(definately for the right reasons). He took pictures of our robot in development and posted it on a website that was advertized.

Personally, I could really care less, since it was about 3 weeks into the season. But our team made it a really big deal and in my opinion, it gave more power to the abuser.

Eventually everything died down, we got the site removed and (somewhat) reconciled with the member, although he is still banned from the team. We went to Canada and we won, so everything turned out ok in the end.

[JVN]

Originally Posted by plutonium83

We went to Canada and we won, so everything turned out ok in the end.

Moral of the story:
As long as you win, everything is okay.
/moral



Brandon-
Can we get a more sarcastic looking smiley face? This one just isn't cutting it.

John

Ok, fine. "We did well"