When the dog doesn’t bark at you when you get home before midnight and you realize she’s ok.
When you tell the cop that pulled you over why you ran through that stop sign (Making a Caffine Run!) and who it’s for and he gives you an escort!
You are at the shop more than you are at school
The machine shop floor feels like a bed
You cant find your keys, and dont really care because you are going to be in the shop so long it wont matter
you have imprints of your safety goggles in your face
your grades plummet
When a team member is speeding home and runs a stop sign at 9:45 at night and gets pulled over only to be let go with a warning because, earlier in the day, one of the engineers on your team had asked the same officer to stop by the school with his radar gun. (yes, another true story ~ Andy can tell you all about it)
- When you blurt out “I NEED THE WRENCH THAT FITS!” and EVERYONE knows which one it is.
You blow a fuse because you’re using too many tools at once. (Happened a lot)
-when you acually come HOME from school (instead of going to robotics) your parents say welcome back like in that mase song
-you have thrown at least one object across the room in frustration
-you cross your fingers when you press the “download” button in ifi
-your so tired cofee doesnt work anymore
-youve huged your electronics board on first power up when it worked… <me> she is sexy this year! lol
-you wrote names on several parts of the robot (brings up funny conversations when you call the ‘ball smacker’ a parents name)
-team bonding time is always centered around food
-food is served and your starving, but you rather finish a certain part on the robot first and food is the reward
-When you notice that with the welder and the kiln (which is heating the garage when it’s 2 degrees outside) are pulling 75 amps at 240v and hope you can get some freelance work to pay the electric bill.
-When one of the cat’s gets into the garage and rolls in the dust and aluminum shavings, and you pick him up and tell him he’s a good kitty.
-When the weight spread sheet shows that you are going to make weight with all options installed and you refuse to believe it.
-When after the bot is shipped, you come up with a backup motor plan and order the gearbox’s to implement that plan.
This is my new ink. Another mentor and I got this on Saturday before the ship-date.
I hope the judges understand my team spirit!
http://www.chiefdelphi.com/forums/attachment.php?attachmentid=4022&stc=1
When you clean the build room and you find long lost junk that you believe will make the next robot a champion…
…ohh and you find clumps of fiberglass dust that are 4 inches talls
when Papa Johns knows your order cold…never happened but im shocked it didnt!!!
…when your little brother forgets what you look like
…when you haven’t seen your dad in 4 days
…when you have a conversation with a non-robotics friend who is also sleep deprived and you understand what they are trying to say, and it seems perfectly normal.
…when going to bed before midnight seems abnormal.
When non-robotics students leave school, come back to watch a basketball game, leave again, then drive by in the wee hours and to stop in to say “you mean you guys never left since 3:00?”
When you fall asleep while sitting on the floor next to the bot waiting for the electrical team to re-wire a Victor, and you don’t realize you’re asleep until the team mom wakes you up by calling your cell phone (Saturday afternoon).
When you leave at 11:00 pm and you feel guilty for stopping work “so early.”
When the students express a deep desire to sleep overnight in the school.
When playing a game of double-entendre with the robot’s “working name” reaches it’s 153rd consecutive verse and every one of them gets a laugh.
When the janitors’ looks have changed from interested, past annoyed, to sympathetic.
When every single person on the team thinks that “Whizzenator” is a great name for the ball feed mechanism.
thats why my mom decided to become team mom this year, to make sure that my case of memory loss, aluminum lung and insane amounts of time spent out of the house were truly due to robotics and not other things.
when your school safty officer stops you in the hall (while your skipping class to work on the robot) thinking that youre hungover, then remembers that your on the robotics team and are in fact just sleep deprived and begins to tell you his ideas of how we can improve the bot and how hes willing to help
You get pissed off at unimportant things…like the floor.
The bottom of the Shop-Vac has become the #1 place to look for lost nuts, bolts, washers, Sharpies, etc… 90% of the time, it’s in there.
You realize that the Koi pond outside is frozen over…and there are still fish in it.
Absolutely no cutting, drilling, milling, or grinding can begin for the day until the kid with the Metallica CD arrives.
You have every Chuck Norris fact committed to memory.
Singing “Afternoon Delight” makes everything A-Okay.
You put in a Metallica CD and then drill something, just to see what it feels like.
Build sessions often begin with the phrase “Alright…Begin the unnecessary harcore rock music!”
when it takes you two days after shipping to figure out how many hours you were in the shop between Friday and Tuesday. (>80 in my case :ahh: )…
Just to be contrary, I wasn’t at the shop at all during the last weekend before shipping. I did talk to the student lead programmer on the phone Sunday afternoon as I drove back from Baltimore to Indiana, but except for those few minutes I had put robotics out of my mind almost completely.
Even so, I didn’t miss out on the fun of spending entirely too much time on a project and getting entirely too much sleep. I left home in the dark hours of Friday morning, drove more than six hundred miles to meet with a group of people at a science fiction convention, got maybe twelve hours of sleep over three days, ending by driving another six hundred miles to get back home before midnight Sunday night. During the weekend I gave suggestions to someone translating Harlan Ellison’s I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream, helped sell copies of The Klingon Hamlet and back issues of HolQeD, played my first game of Klin Zha in over three years, finished a draft translation of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas (to be included in a collection of Hugo-award-winning works published within the next year), watched people playing odd variants on poker, enjoyed a game of ’oH SoH (“You’re it!”), came dangerously close to buying a DVD of the Star Wars Holiday Special, and made way too many polylinguistic puns.
Enthusiastic sleep deprivation does not need to involve building robots.
(Of course, I then spent about twenty hours on Monday and Tuesday programming the robot before shipping it.)
Well,
When your all strung out looking for a ballpean hammer<-happend to me last year
When you start hearing songs comeout of the grinder<-also happend to me last year
When your over 2000 miles from your team for a year, and you miss the smell of hot metal in the mornin’, noon, and night.
And the bummers make a nice pillow.
-If you are Ashley and you somehow know all the tools names…
-If you cant distinguish your right from left
-If your shop looks like a tornado hit but you are able to find everything you are looking for in the matter of seconds
-When you go home all you make is robot connections… “Hey, thats like [team]”
-When you break down crying because of lack of sleep.
-When you start reenacting movies such as spaceballs, monty python, and anchorman
-When sitting is a privilege, not a right
-When finding a stool is harder then finding something to eat
-When you can operate the band saw while sleeping
-when noone shaves, and noone cares about it
-when you whistle a song while walking into the shop, and then when you walk out at least 3 other people are whistling the same song, and don’t know why.
…when you walk outside and ask “Where’d the sun go?”
…when you walk to the car and there is ice on the windshield because it’s 3:30am.
…when the phrase “I’m going to visit the yeti” becomes the most hilarious thing ever. (we called the bathroom we were using the yeti because of the horrendous noise the fan made)
…when you start inventing robotics country songs
…when you decide to write a robotics song “Solder like it’s hot”
…when you start giggling over every dumb thing
…when you decide that it would be hilarious to make a tshirt that said “program reset”, so when the programmer asks you to hit program reset, you can actually hit someone
…when the thing you are most grateful for is food and caffeine brought in by parents
…when the robot has inexplicably moved, and you don’t know why until a team member informs you that you were asleep