pic: Monty Illuminated

[kazand]

Originally Posted by Joe Matt

The lights were interesting too say the least...

... My only complaint with the lights was that they took precident over some of the teams. One time everyone started dancing on the field and they turned the lights off, ignoring the team fixing their robot. A few flashlights and cell phones helped fix it till they turned the lights back on. It would have been nice to have skipped some of the light shows and get back on schedule (we were 90 minutes late at one part.)...

Actually, there are a few misunderstandings in this quote above:

• First, the organizers did not have direct control over the overhead lighting but the custodial staff did. Unfortunately, they had a tendency to misunderstand the cues for turning on and off the lights. No one told them to shut off the lights during the "dance sequence / robot fix" sequence - they merely misunderstood. To imply that we were doing anything other than to get the lights turned back on quickly during the fixing of the robot would be a great disservice to our efforts.

• Second, Monty Madness was not really behind schedule despite some of the posts to the contrary. The schedule was the one printed in the program, not the match listing, and it was designed to be extremely "buffered" with quite a bit of leeway. Alliance Selection was designed to be the pivot point of the schedule and was the target all day long. In fact, we ended Alliance Selection within just a few minutes of the stated times on the agenda. We would have been a half hour ahead of schedule, but four teams hadn't arrived yet when the matches were supposed to begin early in the morning. But since we had the agenda buffer, this delay didn't really impact us. The end of the day went long due to a longer than expected set of elimination matches. Perhaps we should have listed the end time as later to account for the competitiveness of the matches and the use of time outs.

By the way, the three light shows took only a total of eight minutes.