The sound of tires screeching filling up the parking lot as I sit in my car. The clock read 9:20am on my sound system screen. As I get out of my car, I look around the parking lot. Practically empty. Only about 20 cars were around from what I could tell. Why was I here on a Saturday? Because of Robotics.

Getting out of my car, I head towards the front door. Smiling and saying good morning to everyone I see. I walk into the Mr. Steele’s room and scan my QR code on our sign in system and get ready to start my day. The smell of coffee in my thermos. Which means that it’s way too early to function on a Saturday. Mr. Steele is off playing some sort of Monty Python video, blasting the volume. By day his room is a classroom, but by night it’s a robotics room. Most of us spend more time in this room and the other robotics rooms. More than we do in our own homes with our family.

Looking at all the memories that are around the room, it made me think of my story on Skunk Works. I hear Gloria start talking to me.

“Good morning Gloria. How’s it going?”

She looks up from her laptop with a bad look on her face. I can already tell that something is going to set us back building the robot. Somehow she finds her voice. “Pretty bad actually, the waterjet is broken, which means we can’t cut any of the parts that people in Mr. Steele’s room are making in CAD. Which also means that we are going to have to postpone everything for a full week.”

My throat dropped hearing this. “What’s wrong with it, what happened?” What’s the time estimate until it gets fixed?”

“It will be at least a week until we get it fixed…they aren’t sure what was wrong with it. Which means we have to call out someone from Omax to fix it.”

Gloria and I start to walk to the waterjet to check on the status of it. As I look at the waterjet and people scrambling to figure out what was wrong, I realize just how vital the waterjet is to our team. For the past couple years, we’ve been fortunate for this amazing useful tool and sometimes we forget how reliant we are on this powerhouse machine. All of the metal is water jetted that is on our robot and without it our whole production stops. With it being broken, it makes us realize how important it is because we often don’t realize how lucky we have it.

But as a team we continue on striving and making progress when problems like this hit us. Time is of the essence when we are only given six weeks to build, wire, program, and debug a robot.

Walking back into Mr. Steele’s room, we head towards where her other design members are sitting.

“So in the meantime what work can we do to make sure we aren’t anymore behind in the future?”

“I’m already on it, people are working in CAD on a part or they are working on the robot in the shop putting what they can together.”

Looking at the rows of robotics CAD parts on the screens, I notice something.

“Gloria why haven’t these parts been put together into the main file where our final robot will be?”

“Wellllll people are still working on their mechanisms to add.”

Times ticking and we only have a couple days left and there’s still so much to do. So so so much work left to do. My head started to spin as it formed the lists of things left to accomplish.

“What is the current time estimate for our robot CAD model to be done ready to build?”

“I’m not really sure to be honest.” I see the look of disappointment in her eyes as she tells me this. “So as of right now we have a drive base robot with no mechanisms on it because the CAD model is not finished. Right?” I ask wearily, hoping that isn’t the answer. We have to get the climber and collector on ASAP.

“So where is the member in charge of the climber and collector mechanisms?”

“Ronny and Josef aren’t here…”

“Are they coming in later, or are they not coming at all?”

“I think Josef is coming in later, but Ronny I have no idea. We tried calling him but he nobody can seem to get ahold of him.”

So not only is the waterjet broken, but the people who need to be here to work on the robot CAD model designs aren’t even here for our team to make progress.

“Is there anything I can do to help you get either Ronny or Josef in sooner, or something?”

“Right now I think we are ok; we aren’t too far behind,” As she turns away from me. What is she talking about?! We have to bag our robot (unable to touch our robot until competition) on Tuesday??!! How come Gloria doesn’t understand how little time we have left? She’s treating like this is just a walk in the park for her and the thing is that I can’t do anything but call Ronny’s phone a billion times and pray he wakes up!

Looking down at my hands, they were shaking and I can feel my body is getting really warm. Like a hot air balloon blowing up. I try to get Gloria’s attention again to ask her a question and she doesn’t even flinch or acknowledge I was even there.

Screaming out her name to get her attention, anyone’s attention to get help. The whole room started spinning upside down. As if I was in a lava lamp; slowly everything thing slants and goes into slow motion. Just when I thought it couldn’t get any worse, I wake up screaming. Thank god it was only a dream because that was a living a nightmare.