A Day With Mr. Murphy

I went with the robotics team earlier this week to the kick-off of the Summer Reading Program at our local library. 

Mr. Murphy (of Murphy's Law) decided to spend the day with us.

We were supposed to show up at 9:30. 

So, 9:30 rolls around, and I'm sitting in front of the library with my daughter and a 150 pound robot in the back of the van. 

No kids.

9:40 rolls around, and one other member of the team shows up.  There's still no way the three of us are strong enough to lift the robot out of the van, so we begin calling kids and rousting them out of bed.  Two of them are on a cross country road trip with their dad.  Two others are enrolled at music camp for the week, and are unavailable, others are at work.. well, you get the idea.  We finally tracked down the four kids who said they'd be there.

10:00 all kids are present and accounted for.  Robot is in the library, and the little kids are coming in.

10:05 robot is working, picking up balls and shooting them.

10:10 robot stops working.  The kids, in a panic, attempt to find out why it's not working.

10:10-11:30, I and the two young ladies with me, explain to all who come to stop that they are watching engineering in action.  Just look at the way those engineers are looking for the problem.  See?  They are going through each and every possible problem and testing it to make certain that it works.

10:30 - a mother starts to argue with me that that's not what engineers do.  They solve problems!  They don't get their hands dirty!  A long discussion ensues with an older gentleman who is a retired Civil Engineer of 30 years experience, hanging out for the day with his grandchildren.  Mother ends up leaving in a snit, because "Engineers have clean jobs!  They don't take things apart!  They solve math problems!"

10:45, in desperation, we pull one of the smaller FTC robots out of the trunk of another car.  We bring it in and realize that NONE of the kids present know how to work one of the FTC bots. 

11:15 - we isolate the problem.  We need one specific tool and it will be fixed in a jiffy.  I have a van full of tools, but the tool we need is in the warehouse.  We don't have the key to the warehouse.  We track down the parent who does have the key to the warehouse.  He answers his phone, would love to help us, but at that particular moment, he's in San Diego, getting ready to go into a meeting.

11:30 - Summer Reading Kick Off Ends.  Oh, and we manage to fix the wiring without the missing tool, robot now runs fine.

What a wonderful example of the thrills of technology! 

This post originally appeared in my now defunct "Mom's View" blog.  I moved it to this blog at the request of my kids, who wanted to have all of the various posts that accompanied their high school years in one place.  I've matched the publication dates here to their original post date.  If you're reading these posts, I sincerely thank you for taking the time to go back through them all!