To extend or not to extend the ship date!

[Vashts6583]

Speaking as the president of a team who lost both Tuesday and Wednesday due to inclement weather, I still think that the official ship date should not be extended. Not every team has been affected by this very strange blast of arctic weather, so not all teams should benefit from an extension in their deadline. HOWEVER, FIRST might consider extending the ship dates of teams who were affected. Either that, or allow specific teams at regionals an extension in their pit times, depending on their situation, because not all teams at a regional will have been affected. Regardless, teams, like mine, should put in some overtime hours in order to get their robot done by the 20th. I doubt FIRST will do anything (except extend times for the teams that might work under 12' of snow) about the weather, so STICK WITH IT TEAMS!!

May the force, and lots of food, be with you.

[camtunkpa]

I have to agree with many of the posts before me about deadlines are deadlines.Things like this happen many times in the real world. Everyday people have to deal with issues like these.

On a side note delaying ship time would be good for my team right now because we have some gears and shafts out to the guys who do our heat treating and depending on shipping and/or the fix it window we may or may not be assembling our transmissions at Pittsburgh Thank goodness for our practice transmissions. In the end I know the kids on our team are learning a thing or two about logistics and FIRST is all about learning.

[Michael Hill]

Originally Posted by Lil' Lavery

FIRST did extend the deadline in 2003 after a major blizzard, but this is nothing compared to what hit in 2003. Many places are already back in school, or will be tomorrow.
Personally, I think FIRST should allow some more fix-it-window time, but not extend the deadline.

Maybe you're talking about in your area. In West Lafayette/Lafayette, Indiana, however, it's a different story. It was reported that this was the worst blizzard since the late 1970s. Purdue even canceled classes and all operations for 1.5 days, which is EXTREMELY rare.

[billbo911]

Ship dates, rules and deadlines all share one thing in common, they are your friend.

If that doesn't make sense to you, consider this, without them, you would have no direction. Consider them the same as Design Criteria. Without Design Criteria you would have no way to know what to build.

Honestly, we would love to have extra time to build, but that's because we drag our feet. No one else is to blame, not even the weather. So, how do we meet the deadline? We bust our hump for the next 5 nights. (Actually, we need ours finished for a practice session at St. Francis HS, home of the FemBots, this Saturday.) So, we bust our hump tonight and tomorrow and work with what we have Saturday, then finish everything Sunday and Monday.

[artdutra04]

Originally Posted by IndySam

You are lucky, many schools won’t allow students to do what you did yesterday.

No amount of will will change that.

No, but a little creative thinking can at least make something out of nothing.

• If everyone is stuck at home, open up an AIM Chat room with all your team members and discuss strategy (or anything) for your upcoming regional(s).
• If your team owns some Vex robots, make a "programming platform". Put some sensors on it, and let the programmers bring it home. Several hours with a gyro or accelerometer on a Vex robot and they could have the basis for advanced sensor feedback well underway.
• If your school won't let you even work on the robot outside of school, you can always work in Inventor or 3DSMax.
• You can work on your Chairman's and Woodie Flower awards at home.
• You can work on your team's website at home.
• You could go to your sponsor's shop (if possible), and work there.
• You can work on pep club/team spirit buttons, banners, etc. from anywhere.
• If your team does any sort of video production during the competition season, you can work on capturing and beginning to edit video at home.
• If any of the students on your team have Vex robots, have them build 1/3 scale Mini FRC robot. Once the ship date is over, you can build a 1/3 scale rack and ringers and have a cheap practice robot.

While this may not be as good as actually working on the robot, at the very least you can accomplish something useful. I understand many team's frustrations with the weather, as New England has about every weather extremity imaginable except earthquakes and tsunamis. There's not much you can do about the weather, except try to make the most out of the situation.
And if it comes down to it, all-nighters are your friend.

If on Tuesday, FedEx is still closed or cannot access a large portion of the country, then FIRST may decide to extend the ship date by a day or two. But not any longer than that. FedEx still has all the logistics of sorting out 1300 crates and getting them to their destinations in time for Week 1 Regionals, and that is no small feat!

Originally Posted by mzclayton55

Even NASA will postpone a flight when the weather is bad. Airlines will even change their schedule because of the weather. That’s the real world!

With NASA and the Space Shuttle, billions of dollars worth of equipment and seven lives are on stake. With the airlines, there are a lot of assets (such as the planes themselves), employees, and passengers that they do not want to put at stake. But think of the ship date in another way:

Your boss/client expects a major presentation to be done by set date, but the weather is so bad that you cannot get to work to finish it up. If your client is in China, they don't know of or care about your bad weather, they want their presentation done to meet their deadline. So to meet your deadline, you Remote Desktop into your work computer to finish it up from home.

[Ben_pharteen]

all i have to say is

keep in mind the term gracious professionalism in your arguments

[Jaine Perotti]

Originally Posted by FIXIT

Gracious professionalism must be willing to alter scheduled deadlines in order to level the playing field for those teams who have lost 5 after-school build sessions. We cannot require students, teachers, and mentors to take unnessary risk traveling in dangerous conditions to make sure we meet a deadline!

I don't think FIRST is "requiring" anyone to put their lives in danger, nor do I believe that they are showing a lack of "gracious professionalism". They showed plenty of sympathy in the response sent to Tonya here, and I do believe that they understand the difficult situation that many teams are in. You are not being forced by FIRST to drive in bad weather. That is your choice and yours alone. I think it's pretty unfair to judge FIRST negatively and blame them for a situation which they really have no control over.

Originally Posted by mzclayton55

Even NASA will postpone a flight when the weather is bad. Airlines will even change their schedule because of the weather. That’s the real world!

It's true that weather is a highly influential factor in the "real world". However, if FIRST were to extend the deadline because of the weather, why shouldn't they then extend deadlines for teams who don't have as much money, who have lost mentors, or who have problems with team organization?

FIRST does make an effort to level the playing field for all teams, but they can only do this WITHIN REASON. It would be logistically impossible for FIRST to make things 100% fair for everyone, all of the time. Can you imagine being a FIRST official, trying to judge how much extra time each team should receive on a case by case basis? It would truly be an organizational nightmare for FIRST. And if exceptions must be made for bad weather, than exceptions must be made for EVERY OTHER handicapping factor a FIRST team might experience - which definitely would not represent the real world.

So please - try to step into FIRST's shoes for a minute. It would be unreasonable to expect them to be able to place everyone on a level playing field. FIRST isn't all about being fair - instead, it's all about overcoming real-world engineering difficulties. Do the best you can to get as much work done as possible. If you are unable to complete your robot, believe me - there will be plenty of teams willing to help you get back on your feet at the competition. If anyone can overcome a challenge like this, a FIRST team can!

-- Jaine

[kawelch]

I was on a team that could only work on the robot from 3 - 8 weekdays and from 8 - 3 on saturdays. We could not work on Sundays or Holidays. We build it out of a storage closet in a teachers classroom. Should we be given an extension because our school does not allow 24/7 access. We made it both years. Oh and by the way any metal work had to be done with hand tools only.

It's a deadline. Meet it or not, but do not expect it to move.

[paulcd2000]

I dunno if this was just our schedule, but we moved our wednesday meeting to today, and that's the only meeting that was affected. Granted, we also have no tuesday meetings and a four day weekend this week I think they shouldn't move ship date. THere's plenty of arguments for both sides, but there are dozens of teams that weren't even anywhere near the storm, and so that woulod provide an unfair advantage. They have a bit of an advantage, but we shouldn't increase it. the build season is cut short for good reason, and we shouldn't let weather change it.

[mathking]

I would like to echo the comments about keeping the tone gracious and professional, which has been the case so far. It is easy to come across as whining and angry or sanctimonious and smug without really meaning to.

As for the ship date, as many people have said, the practicality of extending the date more than a day or two is not high. They have to get the crates out to the early regionals and there is not a lot of time for that. So I completely understand the argument of not extending the deadline. (Though looking at the long range forecasts for the midwest, FedEx may not be able to do pickups in a lot of places next Tuesday.)

That said, I also don't think it would be a tremendous hardship to extend the ship deadline by one or two days. It is true that deadlines are important, but in the "real world" they are missed nearly as much as they are made. We might even get a lesson in gracious professionalism out of it by asking teams who have not missed any time to ship Tuesday and letting other teams ship Wednesday or Thursday, all on the honor system. The idea of giving teams who had undergone hardships with the weather (or the team that had their work space flooded by sprinklers) some extra time to work on the robots at the regional competitions has merit too. After all, the problem with the carrier plates for the BaneBots transmissions caused FIRST to change the rules, which I think was a good decision.

Above all, everyone have fun these last couple of days. Remember we do this for a lot of reasons, but one is that it is a LOT of fun!

Good Luck from the Bad Robots!

PS- Team 963, I know you guys have had problems with the temporary change in buildings, the cold days, the snow days, the too few bus driver days...my wife teaches in CPS and my kids attend CPS. I actually live just a couple of blocks from the old (and future) East HS. If there is anything 1014 can do to help this weekend send me a message and we'll try.

[Bob Steele]

I would like to make a few comments regarding this issue.

1. FIRST has extended the date before for weather... in that case it was primarily a big Eastern storm... We were given 2 extra days to ship.
This was about 3 years ago as I recall. I seem to remember it happening twice as a matter of fact.... so for those that seem to think that it can't happen because FIRST will not do it... they already have done it..

2. Other teams are still effected by the eastern weather. Parts I had ordered from MSC which were coming from Harrisburg are delayed for weather reasons...they will not arrive until at least Monday... they should have been here Wednesday of this week...

3. This year we have had problems (not anyone's fault in particular...) but nontheless problems with materials from the kit. I have never had to wait so long to get the entire kit... we had parts getting to us 3 weeks into the build..this is unprecedented... especially the amount of parts...
the pneumatics bag, the lights, the gyro sensors... and now the issue with the BaneBot transmissions... I have ordered my plates from Banebot but they seem to be backordered... or at least not ready

I am not complaining about any of the fine people that help out FIRST or the FIRST staff or anyone... I am just pointing out that this year we have an unprecedented amount of issues...

We are in Seattle and even we had snow days during the build.... totally wierd for our city...



Therefore... yes having deadlines are good things.... but we have precedence for past shipping deadline changes... don't be surprised if FIRST decides to do it again... my guess would be 2 days.... Thursday ship instead of Tuesday...

It would simply mean that FIRST has listened to all of us and decided to extend based on highly unusual circumstances...
its been done before...

thanks

[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.