To extend or not to extend the ship date!

[Noah Melamed]

I think the nature of competing in a deadline means teams will inherently have various advantages and disadvantageous some expected others surprises, like weather.

Originally Posted by techtiger1

To add to everyone's weather comments, we have run a competiton in South Florida the last two years after the main playing field carpet was completely destroyed. We usually end up setting the offseason competiton field up at least twice. This year we will probablly have the luxury of having the competiton inside. Anyway the point I am trying to make here is FIRSTERS can make it thru anything and unless your shop is outside the weather shouldn't really be an issue. Pretty much unless there is so much snow you can't open your front door you can get to where you need to build a robot. Extending shipdate is definitely not an option though for obvious reasons. Extending the "fix-it" window sounds like a great idea though.

Just a note about "overcoming" weather sometimes its outside of the FIRSTERS control. I'm sure the entire team would have been there on Wednesday when it snowed. District policy however is very clear if school is closed, no clubs can meet. In this case its more of a liability issue.

[1768]

Originally Posted by Noah Melamed

Just a note about "overcoming" weather sometimes its outside of the FIRSTERS control. I'm sure the entire team would have been there on Wednesday when it snowed. District policy however is very clear if school is closed, no clubs can meet. In this case its more of a liability issue.

Truth.

We had to push really hard on the school administration for a week beforehand to get access to the school on Wednesday.
In addition,the three-quarters of our team who couldn't make it before 10:30AM couldn't get there until about 6:30PM. This wasn't a major problem since the very most committed did get there, but if the storm started an hour earlier no one would have been there.

[JackN]

The reality is that each year several teams will lose days each year because of snow, cold, and bad weather. This year was actually one of the better years as far as snow days are concerned, however we lost days for the cold here in Michigan. I see that many of the posts are coming from areas that don't normally get a ton of snow, making it a problem. Teams in the east and midwest have been dealing with these problems throughout the years and will continue to. In short, better luck next time, the ship date should stay the same to keep a level playing field for all teams.

[NoSkaOnTheRadio]

i'd give anything for another week, but c'est la vie, ladies and gentlemen. of course, many members of team 1757 are already displaying signs of insanity, so i'm not sure if we'd even notice.

quick counterpoint: impossible deadlines are actually part of the fun in my opinion. the all-nighters, the collapses into manic laughter over holes drilled 1/38575" away from where they absolutely need to be, the elation when little things go right for a change, that's what makes the last few weeks of the season the rollercoaster of fun that they are. the season is like some kind of twisted rollercoaster, and the end is like a terrifying drop that scares you witless, but exhilarates you beyond belief.

or maybe i'm one of the crazy ones; who knows at this point?

[Kyle Love]

It's part of the challenge. Sure, we all could use a couple extra days, but as many said before, deadlines are deadlines.

[johnr]

geeez....and i was going to say they should knock a week off the build season. less thinking, more building.