when you have just enough time to go home, shower, and go to school.
Actually: when you don’t have enough time to go home, shower, and go to school.
…the patterns on the bathroom floor’s tiles look like LabVIEW programs
…A bunch of people are on the ground looking at something, and you automatically look for the robot they’re working on
…you’re at the basketball game and you ask who’s on the red alliance
…you no longer say numbers “one thousand, eight-hundred and seventy one,” but rather “eighteen seventy one” (and then promptly wonder if you met a team that had has that number)
you see a group of people crowded around the robot and wonder what you guys screwed up this time
You work late on Sunday night, write down a list of food to get and the McDonalds is closed, and your parents aren’t going to whip up 2 dozen burgers at the last minute, and you have to pack the robot up the next day for shipment, with an openhouse the next monday that has been announced over the PA at school that claims the robot is already done, and the robot doesn’t do half of what it is supposed to do, and one joystick is accidentally unplugged, resulting a half-hour of delays.
You suddenly realize that you are the only Junior on the team, the only programmer for this year, have no practical experience machining raw aluminum, and the guys who know anything worthwhile are Seniors, and the Sophomores spend all of their time on Facebook, while the Freshmen just stand around.
Safety glasses feel more natural than underwear
The first solution was the best solution (and now you’re on the fifth version) (and it is the entire robot that doesn’t work)
A wire cutter and pile of zipties replaces the pencils/pens in the front pocket
you know you overdose on FIRST when you keep some of the buttons you spent hours making
–watchdog not feed is an inside joke between you and your friends
–all your current inside jokes are from robotics
–you can say exactly what your team members and mentors are thinking, because your thinking the same thing
–working from 10am till 11pm is an improvement from last year
–you call your mentors by their first name with out a second thought
–you put robotics before your 500 point research paper due tommorrow
–school is cancelled tomorrow, and the robotics team has already made plans for going in and working.
–your parents use not going to robotics as a threat
–your parents cant carry through on that threat because they have to be there as well
–you wish your teachers would give an extension on all assignments till after the shipdate
–dont understand why teachers dont give extensions for their assignments till after shipdate
–you treat your robot like a dog, (i.e. whistling for it to come, yelling at the robot to stop and not the driver)
–deciding that posting on CD is more important than sleep
–wondering why your robotics team only has 11 members
–wondering how 11 people managed to build a robot in 6 weeks
–you decided that going without dinner to get the baller catcher done is a good idea
Probably said before this build because of all the snow, but i think it needs to be said.
When we’re the only kids to be praying and trying to jinx a snowday during build season, and then having the only status on Facebook, being ticked that there’s a snowday…Like Today, when Bagging is Tomorrow >:(
Oh yes! As soon as I found out that school was canceled I was already calling mentors to find out our plans for the day and see who would be their the earliest so I could show up.
– When your teacher coach won’t let you sleep in class after staying late at the shop because he can’t sleep in class. (But I left AFTER him!)
– When you whistle for the nuts and washers that fell instead of getting new ones because the original are gold colored and look better than the normal silver color.
– When you’re watching the robot being spray painted all you can think is “Holy Cow that’s a sexy robot.”
When you’ve only missed 1 day the entire build season.
When you get home from work ready to inhale some food before running to build, and your 6yo daughter looks at you funny and says ‘you look familiar… I know the face…’
when all wires are ordered 2,3,1,8,7,5,4,6 etc when any sane person would’ve went in order.
You know you’ve overdosed on FIRST when…
you actually participate in Chief Delphi
…When you finish the school day and think, “yay, I get to go home now!”
By home, of course, I mean the robotics room.
You stay at school 26 hours, 17 of which were spent working on the robot.
you’ve actually done this?
it’s easier to modify, build, deploy, and change the cRIO settings (LabVIEW) than it is to make a split PWM
there are either too many or too few cooks in the kitchen
you need to move the shop air compressor outside to hear yourself think
…when a sentence that started out having nothing to do with FIRST ended up like this:
“My friend Calvin, who isn’t in Warbots, who TOTALLY SHOULD be in Warbots…um, what was I saying again?”
…when this is your yearly calender:
Jan-Feb: Build Season
March-April: Competition Season
May-Aug: Demo Season
Sept-Dec: Pre-Season
-When you spend more time on CD than you do on your computer
-When you want there to be school on a snow day so you can go to your team’s meetings
-When CD IS your facebook
When you’re up 'til who-knows-when the night before school starts, finishing the homework that got pushed to the side as you concentrate on preparing for ship date.
When your family knows your not faking sick because they said “you’ll miss robots” and you said “I know”.