So *fun fact* 173 R.A.G.E. (Robotics and Gadget Engineering) is my team, and this legitimately did happen to us last year (2012, Rebound Rumble). Because the lead inspector of the regional knew us and knew a bunch of our team’s mentors, they decided to use our bot to train new inspectors on Wednesday night. However, because the lead robot inspector knew our mentors and those mentors were there on Wednesday night, they decided it would be funny to pull a prank on the rest of the team. So, when we walked into our pit on Thursday morning, we saw our robot unbagged, with a piece of paper taped to it that said “robot disqualified: no lock up, unbagged, illegal parts. LRI (lead robot inspector)”, and his signature.
Now, last year, when this happened, was my senior year, meaning it was my last year on the team. I was also on the drive team and had invested a good hundred hours into driving this bot, so seeing this was beyond devastating.
Also, our pit was the very first pit you saw when you walked into the pit area, so EVERY SINGLE TEAM AT THE REGIONAL saw this sign, which was a challenge in and of itself because this regional was the first ever bilingual regional where the primary language was French, and we were one of 4 American teams, and quite a few of the teams there only spoke French, so there was a bit of a language barrier, especially when we were trying to explain what happened.
So I was practically having a break down, the base driver was flipping out, and the team leader (who btw was not in on the prank) was running around trying to find the LRI to find out what the hell happened.
We find the LRI, who comes over to our pit, and we proceed to see him, one of our engineers, and our drive mentor start to crack smiles and then burst out laughing. They thought it was hilarious. At the time, I thought otherwise. Looking back, I agree that it was hilarious.
They were also planning on “stealing” our robot Friday night so that when we came back on Saturday morning, which is the last day of the competition, the robot was just plain gone. However, when they learned that we were having transmission problems and were trying desperately to fix our transmission, they decided not to do that. I’m pretty sure if they had done that, I would have had a full on mental breakdown.
Looking back, the whole thing was pretty hilarious, and it’s one of my favorite robotics memories :D
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