Listen up, y’all. We can argue all day long about how putting our robot in giant robot c–(redacted to protect Gary Voshol) can needlessly limit teams’ potential to achieve the mission of FIRST. Since the key stakeholders don’t really seem to buy that as a key problem with bag and tag, I was figuring we could reflect on our recent experience with robot suffocation and think of the obnoxious little quirks of the system.
So like, why does the bag and tag form have so little space to write the time down but so much space to write down the time zone? It’s so weird. Time zone only matters for the universal time for Stop Build Day. I don’t think any teams are moving their robot in an unbagging period across time zones.
Anyone else smellin’ what I’m steppin’ in? Anyone got any other Festivus-level complaints to lob at bag and tag?
You know, the part I never understood was why a paper form had to be involved, rather than an electronic form. Seems we’re wasting lots of trees printing these things out, losing them, and reprinting them, when we could be uploading photos to a database for timestamp and distribution to all events. Take photo, mark “in” or “out”, inspectors get access at events.
And half the time MIA forms have been photographed anyways…
The bag is too convenient to teams. It used to be that each team had to create their own crate from scratch, and now FIRST just gives out the bag. There’s no room for real engineering anymore!
Seeing the robot in a bag makes me sad. Making the bag clear is just painful. Sometimes I find myself just looking at the robot thinking of how much work we put into it, just to suffocate it. Also, our robot is not exactly small (as teams that have seen it so far have noticed) but the bags are HUGE, making sure we had the whole end and it was sealed was somewhat tricky.
Explains why Susan from the credit bureau keeps calling me. She always sounds so dejected and numb… I wonder if scammy phone bots get bored reciting the same thing all day.
