hi again guys,

here i am once again, writing a (probably) long post about stuff.

sorry if any of the stuff in this post doesn't make sense or sounds like i'm complaining or being bitchy, i didn't mean it like that when i wrote it. i'm just sharing my thoughts on all this.

after having returned from florida, we had a day to do pretty much whatever (4th of july) before having to jump back into solar car, which was not going!

not going how?

well reader, while we (meaning myself, tar, ben, birb, sysop, and non) were in florida, solar car meetings continued to be hosted in our absence. despite the fact that all the people who could actually do work were gone.

since the people who were showing up couldn't really do much to fix the car and make it run, and it took a lot of debugging to actually find and fix the problem, our lovely advisor (who i will not name because i don't know if sysop will flag me for it, so better safe than sorry) (furthermore RW) tried to fix the car while not actually knowing how to make a car, and then when shit didn't work and people couldn't do work, he got pissy.

how so? well, RW threatened multiple times to cancel the entire trip to texas!

he set a deadline to get the car working for the evening we'd get back from florida, making it impossible for any of us to attend the meeting and try to do work, then set a new deadline for friday night at 6:30 pm.

the deadline he originally set, which he had told himself (meaning he didn't communicate to a single person that he wanted to have the car ready and running by that time), was for 6:30 pm on wednesday 7/3.

the message he sent was rude too, complaining about people showing up and organizing (because they can't do work on the car), but that doesn't mean that other people don't share his "sense of urgency" (we literally couldn't do shit since we were in florida).

basically, he threatened to cancel the trip if the car wasn't running by 6:30 pm on friday, and if it wasn't, it would go back to the school to be worked on for next year.

later that day, he sent another message about having worked for 11 hours straight (nobody asked him or told him to do that, it was completely of his own volition and therefore his own fault for suffering), and then heavily implied that he thought the best thing to do would be to give up.

"Please talk amongst yourselves, decide if you think you can do this or if it's better to gracefully withdraw and live to fight next year."

dog what???

we've been in florida so we can't do shit to work, it's july 1st so there's still time to do stuff, and i don't know why giving up quickly is the "graceful" option instead of doing as much as possible up until either success or failure. if we fail to get the car running, don't go to texas! but there's no reason to give up and admit defeat like that.

and that's just a bit of the nonsense.

there was a whole debacle of people trying to send emails to communicate important information, but despite having everyone's personal emails and their parents' emails, the email senders would send them only to people's student emails, which nobody checks, and a select few personal emails.

skimming over RW's email since i still don't have access to it, RW said in the flock (our messaging app) to be at the shop to work on the car at 8:30 am. i had never driven to a meeting myself and nobody had told me if there was a different time to get there, so i listened and showed up at 8:30.

nobody else was there, and when i messaged tar asking when they'd be there, they said 9:30 am. why? "that's when it starts."

i think they voice typed the message based on the weird grammar structure, but oh my god did that piss me off. genuinely tar, that text message made me really fucking mad (sorry for not telling you straight up, but it was really irritating).

nobody told me to ignore RW and show up at 9:30, so i ended up being there an hour before i needed to, doing nothing for that entire time, and just having to be in the heat suffering extra.

finally, when people started showing up, we still couldn't really do work until around 11-11:30, when ben and birb finally arrived with c1's stuff after the tv interview.

before that though, while we were waiting, i didn't want to just do nothing so tar was explaining electrical stuff to me, but then (no fault of his own), someone started switching the subject off of super basic dumbed down electrical explanation to more complicated electrical stuff and electromagnetics, and they started focusing on that (which i didn't understand at all and didn't want to interrupt), so i gave up and sat down to wait for something to happen again.

so c1's stuff arrives, they start trying to debug, i tried to see what was going on a bit, but i didn't want to be in the way or waste time so i just kind of hovered briefly then would go back to doing nothing before hovering briefly again, rinse and repeat. the hovering did nothing, since i didn't know what was happening and didn't ask as to not disrupt work, so it was just stalling but differently.

my original plan was to leave at around 3 pm to go to a doctor's appointment, but so little was happening that i could assist with that i ended up leaving a full hour before then.

i grabbed lunch to delay a little bit but it was really uncomfortable since i psyched myself out inside and went to eat in my car, and the spot i found in the shade had some guy sitting in his car with the door open and he creeped me out, so i dipped pretty quickly.

got to my doctor's office and was an hour early, so i just sat in my car for 30 minutes outside of the next door cvs. then it was whatever doing the actual appointment, but i figured the solar car meeting would be done at 6:30 pm like RW said, so i just went home.

they did get the car running (13 minutes after the cutoff or something like that, RW thinks it was 7 minutes before) so they ended up finishing closer to 7:30, which was fine.

then the next day we had another meeting to wrap up loose ends and get the car most of the way ready for texas (RW intended it for testing only, we didn't really test it until the end). i got to do a little bit of stuff on the car, but it was mostly minor things.

apparently the car blew up the day before while i was gone because of an arc welding thing? i don't know, when i tried to ask someone to explain what happened they said exactly what didn't help with no additional clarifications, so i gave up and still do not understand.

anyways, eventually they took the car out of the shop to go test it, i stayed in and started putting stuff away because the guy who owned the shop said (paraphrasing), "hey, while we go test the car, a few people should start cleaning up and packing stuff in here."

i thought people would, nobody did, so it was just me trying to shove as much of the electrical stuff into one box as possible. i did get most of it, shop owner bro walked in halfway through my depressed cleaning and commented on the lack of help i was getting, then made a few comments on how best to pack batteries so they'd be safe, then went back out. nice of him to check in, he also moved a fan and pointed it at me so i had some cooler air.

anyways, i got most of the stuff packed and dragged the box into the trailer, and then ben came back into the shop and started pointing out electrical things that i didn't pack in the trailer (they were randomly scattered on 2 different tables, i don't know how they'd expect me to know what stuff is ours/needs to go).

then i was done with cleaning (cleaning wasn't done but i was done with that shit), i had to kneel on the ground so i got a fuck ton of dust on my hands and knees that i had to struggle to clean off with the weird gritty soap stuff and some paper towels, which left the weird gritty sand stuff on my knees (which was gross and i hated the texture of it).

then finally i got to leave which was nice.

going to texas and getting to participate in racing a car is a really cool opportunity, but i just can't really bring myself to be excited or happy for it. i feel more like i'm dreading going :(.

i want to be excited and i want to help out and be a team player and whatever, but there's a very high chance that i will get yelled at by RW (caught in the crossfire of him being frustrated) and i don't want to get in people's way during scrutineering or anything like that. i also don't want to just be stuck doing nothing or small, plain tasks, but there's really not anything i can do to be useful.

i joined the club in the first place because the people were cool and i wanted to learn more about engineering and get to build a car, and i ended up learning a bit of stuff like how to do wiring, but i feel like i haven't really learned much that's actually useful for the club/team. i had to miss meetings for other commitments, and then when i could go to meetings, i didn't get to work on mechanical stuff ever because i don't know mechanical and there wasn't really opportunities to learn hands on or by getting an explanation.

i do not know how the car works in any way, i don't know how cars work in general, and whenever people talk about it, they say a bunch of shit that i don't understand and i don't want them to be short with me for not immediately knowing all of the stuff.

i don't think i'll get to do much in texas anyways, but hopefully going into the next school year i'll get to actually do stuff other than the work that nobody wants to do (like organizing the crate or keeping track of shit, remembering where things are and what inventory we have). if i wanted to organize or clean i could just do that at my house, i don't want to have to go home and teach myself all the skills i need for solar car though just to occasionally get to be useful.

i digress though. it'll probably end up fine, or at worse it won't be and i'll get home and get over it, but yeah. texas on wednesday. woo.
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