Effective June 1, 2024, we are no longer going to allow a second reservation marked “Bumpable” in Skedda for Lasers or CNC Routers. Additionally, we only allow one reservation at a time for these machines. One reservation at a time means that no second reservation can be made for ANY future time until the first reservation is over, or within 30 minutes of being over if extending your current usage AND the machine is available immediately after your current usage. That way, you don’t have to clean up your space before your time is up only to go back to using it again.
There are many reason for the change:
Many members do not like having to contact the member themselves in order to get them to remove the “bumpable” reservation.
Getting hold of the member while in the middle of their first reservation in order to bump the second reservation is often difficult.
Multiple people can show up for the “bumpable” reservation at the same time, creating a confrontation.
A multitude of issues on the management side of it all.
Unfortunately Skedda has limitations that don’t exactly fit all our needs and desires, so we are having to work around the limitations as best we can. We thank you for your understanding as we seek to implement policies that serve all our community fairly.
I never understood the rules and etiquette for bumpable schedules, so I actually like this policy change, mainly because I didn’t get how it worked. So forgive me if this is a dumb question…
EDIT: My reading comprehension isn’t always the best, and after re-reading Shane’s post I think I fundamentally misunderstood the time limit rules. I’m leaving this comment up so that if anyone else is confused we can discuss/clarify current and future policy.
In the orientation slides we mention a 3 hour per day limit on the lasers and 4.5 hour limit per day on CNC. So I was wondering if this is per machine, or a 3/4.5 hour limit for the entire space?
The wiki isn’t totally clear and since we’re trending toward a less casual booking system I know this question will come up.
No one has asked me about it so far, but this post got me wondering.
I can imagine using a big laser to cut for 2 hours and moving to one of the small lasers to do my etching in order to not hog up the more in-demand machine all day.
But etching takes longer than cutting and if it’s a hard limit of 3 hours total then I’d have to plan around that. (not to mention the extra effort/risk of having to register an image on a pre-cut work piece)
Also if I picked a day/time where no one was on the schedule I would be bummed if I had to stop at 3 hours on a holiday where I was the only person in the building and demand for the laser room being zero.
I love the idea of encouraging people to split their work between machines when possible so that the popular lasers are more frequently available!
Though I personally don’t do much etching yet, I can imagine a scenario where someone’s etching job would need to be 4 hours, even if they’re working as fast as possible, or they underestimated troubleshooting time eating into a project that they know ALWAYS takes 2.5 hours.
After 3 hours I’m usually tired and just want to go home haha, so this isn’t an immediate concern for me, just something I figured could use clarification.
There is a time limit on the TYPE of machine per day. So if you use any of the lasers, that time limit applies to a all the lasers. You can have a CNC reservation for that same day, but it will apply to all the CNC machines. If you are going to switch lasers, as in your description, then the total for the two lasers is the limit for the day - 3 hours.
Those are the highest demand machines, so we created the time limits to make sure all members have the opportunity to use it. It can be frustrating to have those limits, but they made the most sense at the time. We will review the process to make sure it still makes sense.