Your Worst FIRST experience

[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"

[Libby Ritchie]

We had a retired machinist that donated his shop to our team to build in a few years ago. Unfortunately, he had breathing problems, causing panic attacks. He had been in and out of the hospital the weekend before we shipped the robot. As soon as he got back home, he was back out in the shop wanting to help us again. The only nights he missed working with us was when he was in the hospital for two days.

Three days after we shipped the robot, I got a phone call from one of our students, who lived next door to this man. When I got there, I was horrified. He had a panic attack and couldn't deal with not being able to breath well...and he killed himself.

Our kids were mortified, wondering what we could have done to make a differerence or if there was something that we could have said or done to prevent this from happening. This man's wife comforted US and thought that if anything, his love for the kids and the team was something that actually kept him around for a bit longer. We attended the funeral and even said a few words at his funeral. It was by far...the worst thing we've experienced as a team.

[Michael R. Lee]

Getting tackled in 2002 at KSC Regionals by people from Heatwave (312) cause we had won when like three of us went over to say good game. I tried to dodge out of the way but I was in the middle..... broke my safety glasses, watch, and sunglasses. Good pairs of glasses too...

[Michael Hill]

ok, the TechnoKats split up into 4 vans this year. Let me start off by saying this had to be the most fun/frusterating trip. On our way to the Midwest Regional up in Chicago, our team got split up in a traffic jam. Let's just say the other 3 vans made it, but our van ended up going past 6 Flags Great America. We wanted to skip the regional and hang out there, LOL JK. It was closed. We finally called one of the student's dad, who just happened to live in Chicago to get us back to where we were supposed to be. We finally made it.

The second worst would be the second night at our hotel up in Ypsilanti. It was a bad regional for us, but that night was just bad. One of our team mates came into our room, and we were all horsing around. He tried to tickle everyone, but Mike Sholty, who happend to be a wrestler in middle school, was laying on the bed when he was getting tickled. He told him to stop...he didn't stop tickling, so Mike threw him into the wall and left a pretty big crack. We now call that hotel the "Paper Thin Inn."

[techtiger1]

I have had disagreements with some things. Like the way allience partners are picked and of course the fact my teamates never let me sleep. lol but i have to say i have enjoyed the whole FIRST experience. Overall it has been alife changing experience for me. Thanks FIRST and all the people who help to make it run as smoothly as it does.








T man
aka Drew Disbury
team#1251 THE TECH TIGERS
2004 ucf regional rookies of the year

[Cory]

Originally Posted by #1Transgirl1140

worst thing that happened but was also very funny was when the allaince picking happened, the team that was supposed to pick us couldn't read there own writing and called out the wrong number....1040. We were so mad.

I have a story extremely similar to this, which has become one of my favorites that I tell people. Dont be confused by the title of this thread though, this was definitely not a terrible experience

In 2002, our robot did absolutely terrible at SVR. We tried too much, and didnt get much of it to work. We scored the single highest point value match at the regional, and made it to the semi finals, but none of it was due to our own success.

Nationals was an entirely different story. We were doing really well the entire time, in 4th place most of the time, then 7th and 8th for awhile, and never lower than 11th in Einstein. Obviously I am biased, but we thought we had one of the top single goal robots in our division.

We headed into our last match in 7th place, and stunned that we were likely going to end up in picking position. We were up against Team 16 (Baxter Bomb Squad, who had an AWESOME ball robot in 2002). We did what we could to hold our own, but they were really too much for us, and practically cleared the field of balls.

The final score ended up being 52-48, which dropped us down to a tie for 11th place. The irony here is that had the scores been reversed, we would have moved into 1st, or 2nd place in our division. Instead, we ended up being the number 9 team after alliance pairings, and didnt play.

It gets even better though. Throughout the weekend we had developed a good relationship with a team we played well with in one of our first matches, and had been told that they wanted to pick us in the alliance pairings. When it came time for them to pick, they made a mistake and chose Team 10, who did not exist.

A lot of people on my team were pretty mad, but I was ecstatic to have even made it to a position where we could be picked, after all our struggles at regionals, and things like that happen. In the end, everyone was able to see that things like this arent that big a deal, and accomplishment cannot be judged by where you finished, or how many medals you bring home.

Some outsiders may think that this was a pretty terrible moment, but that one competition was one of the greatest experiences I have ever had.

And to really get back on topic, I don't think my worst moment ever is really appropriate to be posted here

Cory