pic: IRI Prank #1

[Karthik]

Originally Posted by Pavan Dave

If Karthik and 1114 can post on here and say what happened to their robot and what damaged what maybe people will calm down without a magic "chill pill" and shrug or laugh this off.

What's funny to one person is just an annoying story about a chicken in traffic to another...

Here's the deal on the pranks. On Thursday, Arefin and crew, along with some 1114 students/mentors decided to hide our robot. When I first heard about this prank, I was pretty annoyed. But after learning the details, and knowing that our students and lead teacher helped transport the robot, I was okay with it. My primary concern was the safety of the robot, and knowing that the proper precautions were taken made eased my concerns. Do I think it was an ill-advised stunt? Yes. Am I angry/annoyed about it in the slightest? Not at all. (Arefin, no need to keep apologizing, we're cool with it.) The other thing about this prank, was that Arefin has been friends with 1114 for a while. It's not like some stranger came and stole our robot.

The second prank on Saturday was a different story. I don't want to go into all the details, since the perpetrator has yet to speak to us about it, but basically someone who our team was not familiar with decided to saran wrap our robot before the elimination rounds. We were not happy with this prank at all, for a couple of reasons. It was performed by someone not associated with our team in the slightest. When I pull pranks, I pull them on my friends, not complete strangers. For example, if I were to saran wrap Paul Copioli while he was sleeping, it'd be funny, we'd both laugh, the world would go on. If I were to saran wrap a 6'2", 200 lb stranger in his sleep, he'd probably punch me in the face and break about 83 bones. This would be deserved.

The second reason this prank was a bad idea, is because the prankster had no idea what damage could have been done, to the robot or himself. Every FRC robot is delicate in it's own way. For example, say our ram was loaded? The prankster could have easily released it thereby sending our ram flying into their face. This would be what I call a "less than good situation".

I understand some of the outrage about this pranking controversy but really everybody is over reacting unless some damage was caused.

Pavan, I have to disagree. The "no harm, no foul" caveat doesn't apply here. It's akin to saying that speeding is fine as long as you don't hit someone. There's a reason we have laws against speeding, to prevent damage from occurring. We're fortunate that our robot took no damage during the prank, and we're even more fortunate that no one was hurt by our robot.

Anyways, the lead mentor for team of the student who performed this prank called me on Sunday and apologized profusely. We're more than over the situation (although a few of us were pretty annoyed in the moment), and are pretty surprised that this became an issue here on CD. Hopefully we can all turn this situation into a positive lesson about "good ideas" and "bad ideas". Or to put it more succinctly "think before you act".

Originally Posted by AndyB

Good Prank: Karthik Matress Taco.

Now here's something I totally disagree with.