One of the teams (611, I believe) came to pit admin on Day 3 of the NASA/VCU regional to fill an oddball parts request - a pneumatic ROFLcopter for Team 1337. Team 1337 no longer exists, so this is obviously a joke. It was a good joke, but it didn’t please everyone - pranks are fun early on, but on Days 2 and 3, it’s kind of annoying to get bogus parts requests.
The pneumatic ROFLcopter was displayed at pit admin for a while until the team came back, needing the actual part attached to the sheet of paper.
I had to explain the joke to them, heck i even looked for team 1337 until I realized it was part of the joke.
[soapbox]just a friendly reminder to other teams tempted to try this again: the volunteers are taking time off from their busy lives to help you out. They are just as tired as you are and they my not understand why you are “pranking” them. I think it would have been much better for you to just say, “thanks for helping out!” [/soapbox]
Yeah, I figured out it was a joke immediately, though it took some explaining to get the rest of the people at pit admin to understand. Pranks are fun in moderation, but they can be quite annoying on Day 3 when we’re all tired.
You all really prefer Thursday pranks to Friday & Saturday pranks? I think I would much rather be the butt of a joke when I’m completely exhausted. It seems to me that few of us would want to be bothered from our work on Thursday ironing out various problems. Jokes like these are much funnier when they don’t interrupt me from something more important.
In my experience the people at Pit Admin (as well as all the rest of our great volunteers) are wonderful, and they love being around you guys. Part of that is being able to joke around with you all, but a prank like this is definitely something to be done carefully and with the approval of your team’s leadership.
To future Pit Admins: ignore requests for left-handed smoke shifters!
