Shipping Stories -- Tales of Mid-February

[NOV8R]

In 2006 on ship day one of our faculty came up with a way to give us a few more hours to be able to work on our robot. Since the storage warehouse was only about 20 miles away, he offered to drive the crated robot down using the school's stake bead truck. So just before the last minute we put the crated robot in the truck. In all the haste there was only one problem. No one bothered to tie it down. What are the chances of a nearly 300 plus pound robot/crate sliding out the back of a truck? You guessed it, at 70 mph on a freeway headed to the warehouse it came out and rolled numerous times in the median. Luckily no other vehicles were following very close and what was left of the robot came to rest in the median. On the Thursday morning of the competition the shrink wrapped remains were waiting for us in our pit area. Other teams seeing what was left started wagering wether we would be able to rebuild it in one day. The next morning a battered but functional robot made the field. It took six weeks to build it and only one day to rebuild it.