James & Georgie

So, over the last six months I was working (for free) at a small engineering company around two hours from my house. We were taking part in an international robotics competition to make a robot that could autonomously travel through a maze and tag with a laser some stationary red bins and walking people in red overalls. The objective was to have three robots that were capable of this; and this is how it all went down.

Up until the last two months, everything was so relaxed. They eventually figured I wasn’t too bad at maths, so I was in charge of almost every mathematical task in the robots’ programming. When that was done, I helped make cables, and do some rudimentary machining tasks.

The guy running that place was retarded. Some of his ideas included:
-redesigning the chassis of the robot literally seven times over (the last amendment being a week before the contest date). At the end it was still…a rectangular box.
-coating the rubber tyres in Teflon to ‘reduce friction’. Hello, that’s how wheels work? And besides, I don’t think tyres can stand 400 degree C heat. The worst part was he made one of us call up a Teflon company, and when he was told it was a stupid idea the guy laughs and goes ‘Well, maybe we should’ve researched it a bit more”
-tried to make me sweep the floor because he had nothing for me to actually do (but I couldn’t leave early). I swept around one square metre before leaving

etc.

Finally, the day of the contest crawled around. It was a Saturday, too. The dad of the guy who ran the place turned up to help out, and we were using cable-ties to secure some plastic sheeting to posts we had driven into the ground; this would serve as a barrier. One of the cable ties his dad put in were upside down, and I had to state it five times and pull it out in front of him before he was convinced.
Like father, like son. Eh?

The government people (it was a govt run competition) turned up on the dot, and we were still scrambling to set up the maze, and some people were trying to…fix the robot. It didn’t move. At all. It had to be driven with some hastily written code controlled with a big fat Cat-5 cable running to a laptop with a guy walking behind it. Not impressive.
The reason why this was, was because we had never tested this robot because we simply ran out of time. Ironic, considering how laidback he was the first few months. Pathetic.
So our evaluation started four and a half hours late, and I got home at a quarter past eight.
Yay.