Hi everybody, first off thanks for all your concern, good wishs, texts, e-mails and dark humour (you know who you are!).
For those that don't know I had about 20mm of my left ring finger cut off when Pressure's flipper dropped whilst loading it into the arena.
I was being assisted in the loading and, despite a warning not to, the flipper was pushed up in the effort to get the bot in.
This made the locking bar drop out and the rest is history.
The irony is I was watching and warning him to mind his fingers as he had his hand under the front of the machine at the time.
Weapon locks are often the subject of debate as some are ineffective and/or risky to remove, the committee are on it at the moment.
One of the main problems is that the variety of robots makes a standard difficult to establish.
Hopefully we can set a guidline with a testing system for weapon locks and make it part of the tech check.
Finally (almost) I would like to say a special thanks to Tim and Meryl for getting me and my van home, for Ian, Richie, John and jake (and anyone else that helped) for loading it.
To Clive and assistants for, in true, professional police standards, conducting a fingertip search of the incident site.
Mike.
PS The committee has decided that, to stay in line with descimination laws, the robot fight end countdown will be changed.
It will now be:
9and3/4, 8and3/4, 8, 7, 6, 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, Cease.