Would you care to highlight those numerous rabid attacks on the OP?? None jumped out at me in the first 50 posts.
When I saw the first few posts, I could not help but think the OP and her buddy may have gotten off to a bad start with BD and things went down hill from there with all parties involved. I'm not saying it the fault of one party or the other - just that they got off to a real bad start. When I asked the OP about the reason(s) for such an unusual weight request, the OP became somewhat hostile and accused me of being Irene. And the OP has yet to provide any reason for such an unusual weight need other than it is reasonably clear the weights were not intended to be distributed over a number of divers. Now, I do feel that a dive dive op has a responsibility to make some attempt to insure, as best they can, that divers are reasonably weighted. That is not under-weighted (probably corrected in the check out dive) and not so over-weighted that buoyancy control problems (and possible reef damage) are magnified by excessive weight. I further suspect that, just as the OP has refused to address any reason for the 24# need in this thread, she and her buddy persisted in a similar refusal at the dive shop. I guess there are folks here who believe it is none of the dive ops business why a diver might require 1 or 2 pounds or 25 or 50 pounds. Or maybe they feel that 24# is not an unusual request for warm tropical waters. We are just going to disagree on that.
Due to the OPs decision not to provide any rational, I have to make some assumptions. I assume that the divers physical appearance did not provide an obvious answer or the issue would probably never have come up in the dive shop. So the answer was probably in the thermal protection, Now, even a 3mm suit (not uncommon in the tropics) which someone other than the OP suggested has a buoyancy range of 4 to 10 pounds as a function for size and materials. A 5mm suit (somewhat uncommon in the tropics but not unheard of) might have explained the need on a larger diver to use 24# as they may provide 14 to 16 pounds buoyancy in larger sizes. With the group being from the NE, I even considered the possibility of a 7mm suit and that could easily put 24 lb of lead on even a smaller diver. But it is clear the OP chose not to reveal that here and, I suspect, refused to discuss it with the dive op. I am not now nor have I ever condoned a rude response from the dive OP, but it is fairly clear to me that there appears to be a lot more to the story than what the OP has chosen to present here. And, while I appreciate to new poster who substantiated the incident, that does not answer my concern that the responsibility for the initial incident is not one sided. I never really doubted the incident, only the actions of both parties that precipitated it. At this point, I do believe BD may well have been rude in response to an uncooperative client.
), there is so much that is not conveyed over the internet, and the fact that people often feel rushed to post, things often are interpreted differently than the original intent. And, not unlike your friend's exchange with Irene, if the reply to the misinterpreted post gets the other person's back up then we end up where we are today.....although the dramatic performances are usually milder than they were in this thread. I stated above that this thread did good and I do believe that. I think that every post (I am assuming this because I will not go back and reread every post) had a valid point to it......maybe they were just written in cranky Irene language.
