Divemasters: Beware the West LA Sport Chalet!!

[fnfalman]

BTW: For all those reading this thread, assume you are doing air fills and someone with a c-card comes in and asks for a fill and your assessment is that the person is not safe to dive (i.e. the person asks to have his oxygen tank filled and then asks about new flippers) -- would you do the fill?

It's not my job to make sure that somebody is "safe" to dive. Who am I to determine if a person is "safe" to dive? What are the criteria other than referring to an air tank as an "oxygen" tank? Old timers still call them floppy things "flippers". If the diver is heavy set, then should I determine that person unsafe to dive? Refuse air fill? Am I a medical doctor now? If a person were to look at a snorkel and asked what good is it for, should I refuse the air fill?


Does that person have a C-card or not? It's that simple.

 

[leabre]

BTW: For all those reading this thread, assume you are doing air fills and someone with a c-card comes in and asks for a fill and your assessment is that the person is not safe to dive (i.e. the person asks to have his oxygen tank filled and then asks about new flippers) -- would you do the fill?

Well, it depends, a very brand newish diver who just did is 2.5 day crash course in SCUBA may still have terminology issues (and many others) but still has a C-Card. So unless the tank truly is an oxygen tank or says O2 clean, why shouldn't I feel it? Should I refuse to if he calls his mask goggles? If he's too obese? How about missing a limb or two? Around here there are quadrapelegic people diving succesfully.

It's not my place to judge whether their a safe enough diver to stay alive or not, given they have a C-Card they get the fill unless there is some agency or legal violation in place (the oxygen example I gave above).

But my 1st question will be why are you showing an expired card? Potentially misrepresenting your current professional status with the agency in question? My point is if anything where to happen you are putting yourself in a dangerous disposition to mis-represent yourself as a DM if you are not current. This incident is easily correctable: flash any one of the lower level certs you acquired along the way. One has got to expect if there is an expiration date that someone would notice it and take it seriously regardless whether you're an certified diver or not.

 

[hayaku]

Just FYI, but if you by your tanks at Eco Dive, they give you free fills for life. I'm pretty shocked that the West LA Sport Chalet sucks that bad. I've been there a couple times, and the guy in the scuba shop seemed to know what he was doing. Try Eco dive though, I've been really happy with their service.

 

[diver_doug]

So I went in to get a fill the other night at the West LA Sport Chalet. The employee asked for my card. I gave him my divemaster card. He looked at it and said, "Sorry, but this has expired."

I did a double take and explained to him that while the membership in PADI has expired, the certification is lifetime.

Never mind the fact that you have to pass three levels of certifications of diving that are lifetime, and never mind the fact that I did my DM at that very store, and never mind the fact that the employee was a PADI diver- he STILL insisted my card was expired and my tanks couldn't be filled, "as my certification wasn't current."

Of course, then the manager came by. I thought he would enlighten this employee, but no such luck. He agreed with the employee, while I kept insisting that PADI certifications are lifetime, and nobody had ever raised an issue of the date when checking my C-Card.

I couldn't believe it! I don't think I'm going to back to that store again, but does anybody have any suggestions on a better explanation if (god forbid) this sort of confusion should happen again?

Until then, I guess I'm packing my Rescue Diver card.

I used to work at Best Buy and we had all sorts of idiots there. There were people who believed a TV would blow up (I'm not making this up) if it had Component Video inputs and you hooked up a DVD player with anything other than Component Video cables. Plus almost nobody there knew anything about the products other than what was printed on the card in front of them (even then, they didn't really know what the specs meant). This is what happens when companies pay people $10/hr for a $15-20/hr job. You pay people well, you attract quality people. You don't pay people well and you attract, well, the people the OP dealt with and virtually everyone in the retail world.

 

[Dive California]

Yeah, ditti on calling PADI HQ to advice them so they can talk with Sports Chalet///that's a big PADI customer and PADI would want to make sure that the right message was going out...

 

[shoupart]

The assumption/given scenario is one that would raise alarm to any sensible employee, but that isn't really analogous to what my situation was.

In fact, it was the reverse: you're talking about when a customer is ignorant of what the situation, and I'm describing an instance where the management/employees are the ignorant ones.

It breaks down further when you consider that Sport Chalet is a PADI shop (so they should know this), and they claim to be "dive experts", and this was the very exact store who did my training. So I don't think there's much of an excuse to be this ignorant. Additionally, when I worked at Sport Chalet in one of the dive shops, I knew what was acceptable and unacceptable in terms of C-cards and how they worked.

 

[shoupart]

Well, it depends, a very brand newish diver who just did is 2.5 day crash course in SCUBA may still have terminology issues (and many others) but still has a C-Card. So unless the tank truly is an oxygen tank or says O2 clean, why shouldn't I feel it? Should I refuse to if he calls his mask goggles? If he's too obese? How about missing a limb or two? Around here there are quadrapelegic people diving succesfully.

It's not my place to judge whether their a safe enough diver to stay alive or not, given they have a C-Card they get the fill unless there is some agency or legal violation in place (the oxygen example I gave above).

But my 1st question will be why are you showing an expired card? Potentially misrepresenting your current professional status with the agency in question? My point is if anything where to happen you are putting yourself in a dangerous disposition to mis-represent yourself as a DM if you are not current. This incident is easily correctable: flash any one of the lower level certs you acquired along the way. One has got to expect if there is an expiration date that someone would notice it and take it seriously regardless whether you're an certified diver or not.

Right, I somewhat agree- from now on, I'll probably just bring a different card. However, since you've got a bunch of certs yourself, wouldn't you agree that, by showing a DM card, you can deduce that the person in question has been certified for the prerequisite levels, all of which are lifetime, and therefore wouldn't you know that the person is certified?

I didn't think of it in terms of professional representation or not; when I was arguing with them, I told them the expiration meant the professional membership had expired, but the certification had not; which is what my instructor agreed was the proper interpretation. (I will have to check w/ PADI on that and see if I can still be considered a divemaster if the dues have lapsed.)

 

[Thalassamania]

Hmmmm. At our shop, we just ran a married couple (nice folks) through OW. They had purchased new gear from a "SoCal" Costco the week prior. Same gear, IST regs.

The hose routing was kinda wonky, so as a favor, the shop owner up here reconfigured the regs to something reasonable. That's when he noticed it...corrosion. The corrosion looked just like one of the regs had been used in the ocean for a while, never rinsed...

New.

No word yet if Costco will make it good.


All the best, James

The one thing that I'll say for COSTCO is that they always "make good."

Regardless of what we say here on SB about taking personal responsibility for yourself, the reality of the world is that if something goes afoul on your dive and you are unable to accept personal responsibility, your heirs are likely to sue the dive shop. (Recall the incident at the Avalon dive park.) Who wants to be the employee who is identified as the one who gave you an air fill with what appears to be an expired card? The same goes for the manager. I'm sorry, but if I were SC corporate management, I'd educate both the manager and the employee about certs being for life and then commend them for at least having the common sense to be concerned over the expiration date.

BTW: For all those reading this thread, assume you are doing air fills and someone with a c-card comes in and asks for a fill and your assessment is that the person is not safe to dive (i.e. the person asks to have his oxygen tank filled and then asks about new flippers) -- would you do the fill?

That's a lot of horse pucky, certified is certified, and you must be a certified dive to ever get a DM card. If that's too much of a risk, stay in bed.

 

[shoupart]

Update:

I got a call from the West LA Sport Chalet general manager this morning, and we had a conversation about what happened and how to make it better. It was very civil- no yelling, no demanding for anybody to get fired, etc. He pledged to solve the mistakes, better educate the department, etc, and asked me to contact him if I experienced any other issues.

 

[Leejnd]

I'm glad to hear that the store recognized the problem, and is making a conscious effort to fix it. The undeniable fact here is that the dive op gave poor, incompetent customer service. Regardless of the current status of Jason's DM membership/insurance, anyone who works in a dive shop should know that he couldn't have obtained a DM card to begin with, without having completed certifications that have NO expiration dates, for life. So that was bad service, plain and simple.

I wouldn't want anyone filling MY tank who doesn't understand one of the most basic things about scuba (certifications). If they don't even know that, how can I be confident they'll fill my tanks properly? There are a lot of things they could do wrong, that could put my life in danger.

Jason absolutely did the right thing here, in all regards. And kudos to the SC manager for pledging to solve the problem.