so we all know that FIRST is all about Gracious Professionalism and coopertition… but what happens when coopertition goes a step further when you joke with an incoming freshman or any other teammate and they actually believe you? today i heard a joke about the left handed screw driver that an older teammate asked a freshman to bring him… the poor guy went around several pits asking for one until finally someone told him there is no such thing…
so lets use this forum to share funny but friendly stories and jokes that were played on people in FIRST
this past season at the buckeye regional, i decided that for my senior year i was going to prank one freshman. i went up to him after opening ceremonies and said: “look, i’ve got about twenty things to get done, and we forgot to bring a left handed screwdriver. i NEED a left handed screwdriver, can you find one for me? just go around to all the other pits and ask for one. thanks!” once i had convinced him that i absolutely had to have one, i went back to our pits to finish up some electronics work. he came back a few times and told me that no one had one, so i asked if he’d asked every team yet, upon which he’d go to ask a few more teams. eventually one of my team mates wondered why i was laughing so hard, and i let our coach in on it. after about 15-30 minutes after i’d initially asked for the mythical item, we explained to him exactly what was going on. needless to say, i want to get that kid a real left handed screwdriver at the end of his senior season
don’t worry, i know he’s only trying not to laugh when we bring it up
That’s a pretty standard one-- metric crescent wrenches, non-ferrous magnets, and left-handed screwdrivers (and the occasional flux capacitor) are asked for at the Pit Admin from time to time.
My favorite, though, on my team involved a dirty rubber disk of some kind. We’d hold it like it was metal and therefore heavy and tell an unsuspecting freshman, “Here, catch!” just before tossing it their way.
weneeded longer leads on the robot side of the andersen connector, and we had to send the wire out to get “streched”… as a joke, the mentor first brought back a really thin, light colored set of wires that really looked like they’d been streched, and some of the new kids on the team stood in awe… untill they found out what was going on…
said mentor then returned to the “wire stretcher” and got a new wire, the correct guage, but still with stressed looking insulation!
Waiting for alliance selection on Newton Field this year, some of us representatives were talking about having someone announce that they lost The Game on stage. I wasn’t going to do it, but I was really hoping someone else would, that would have been classic.
At Monty Madness this year during alliance selections I was with our team in the stands watching Aashay, one of our head scouters and my friend, talking to the other representatives on the field. Then we decided it would be a good idea to give him a few calls. Every time one of us called him he’d look up and laugh when he finally answered the phone and i yelled, “Don’t talk on your phone while you’re on the field!” The look on his face was priceless.
We do so much to one teammate that it’s not even funny…I believe she thought that China was in South America at one point!
A fun-but mean-one is, when demoing a robot, wait until someone walks by and just make the robot twitch a bit-not enough to move, but enough to make noise. It scares the crap out of them, especially when they think it’s off!
This year, my team’s robot’s drivetrain is extremely quiet. One of our team members slowly sneaked it right behind a mentor who was talking so that they’d jump when they turned around.
I’ve always wanted to man the gun so when someone’s holding the box or something for the robot to dump in, I tap the long range button and pelt them in the face with an orbit ball
haha that’s a pretty good one… the offseason after overdrive we did some work on our robot to improve it before IRI and just to make it more presentable. well, I decided to bring my dog to some of these meetings to cheer up my teammates and my dog… the dog ended up chasing the robot around and then when the robot turned around ran away from it. it was great! :yikes:
Night before ship, 2007. 1618 had most of the robot done, but had yet to weigh it. Another mentor and I crammed the robot (then called What Robot?–the Uppercut name didn’t come about until Palmetto) into the back of my Honda and drove a couple of miles up the road to 1293’s shop. They work out of a shipping warehouse, which means they’ve got a scale good for weighing robots. We put the robot on the scale and find it to be ridiculously underweight–98 pounds–and I snapped a picture as proof. We then decide to pull one on the rest of the team, so I put my foot on the scale and press down a bit to push it up to about 126–enough to cause mild panic the night before ship, but not enough to sound implausible–and snapped a second picture. They bought it hook, line, and sinker until I showed them the first photo.
A good way to freak someone out is to get 2 or 3 people to walk up to someone, and with a straight face start saying, “seriously? really? You couldn’t just take care of it? For real? I can’t… Man, seriously?” and just keep saying those things. It was really fun when we did it to people in the morning before we left for a trip.
