Shipping Stories -- Tales of Mid-February

[Ian Curtis]

[NOTE: I'm pretty sure I've got this in the right place, but if a mod thinks it deserves to be in Chit-Chat, I've got no qualms]

So, every year in the middle of February the FedEx man comes to pick up a big wooden crate filled with six weeks of hard work, sweat, and tears. It is very important to you the team that this wooden crate gets picked up by a certain time, because who wants to miss out on the action at the Regional? In my 6 years of crating robots, lots of interesting things happened, and I'm sure they've happened to others too. I'm not interested in bashing FIRST or FedEx (imagine where we'd be without these people!), but I am interested in funny, heartwarming, or otherwise entertaining stories.

P.S. I did search for this and nothing came up, but my CD-Search-Fu may be lacking.

This thread was triggered by this quote:

Originally Posted by Chuck Glick

321 didn't get picked up today because the front desk of the high school wouldn't let him in! We had told the school that FedEx was coming for pickup today several times but apparently someone didn't get the message.

Thank goodness the FedEx driver was nice enough to come back and get it for us!

On my side, in 2006 the FedEx driver was on a tight time schedule, showed up 2 hours early and informed us he would be leaving in 10 minutes. We were in the middle of driver's practice. We managed to carry our robot down a flight of stairs, grab our screw guns and strapping tools, cross a warehouse, crate the robot and get the crate back across a warehouse in under 10 minutes. In those frantic moments, we acted as a cohesive team and the adrenaline was intense. (And the FedEx guy was very happy that he got to drive away on time!)

Another time we offered the FedEx guy cake as we rolled the crate from our practice field to the loading dock. He was also a happy camper.