That's my attitude too. I'm happy if someone wants to help me and anyone, no matter how competent can forget something. I've attached drysuit inflators and turned on tanks during the descent and recently had to untangle my hose and do the s-drill again once we were on the bottom... Completely avoidable and potentially hazardous... the whole idea of the buddy check is to avoid problems so I don't see why someone would feel that another diver was out of line for checking.
That said, I do double check my valves if someone has been turning them. Double check the double check. Nothing wrong with that either and it only takes a moment.
R..
---------- Post added December 29th, 2012 at 02:45 PM ----------
On a bit of a tangent to this thread, I have a story:
I once had a diver for a "guided dive day", which is something that we ran through the shop so divers could network with potential buddies and enjoy a nice day of shore diving together.
This diver didn't know me so he didn't know that in addition to a "lowly" PADI pro I was also an experienced technical diver.
So he comes in to the briefing and I sent around a paper to get everyone's name, telephone number and certification details and he writes on the sheet "technical diver" and declined to fill in the number of dives he had. I quizzed him about it and he claimed that he had done a PADI Tec-40 specialty so I figured he had at least 30 dives. I really should have asked to see his card though because later in the day I was pretty sure he hadn't.
I started getting doubts when we got to the site and he put on a jacket that said "INSTRUCTOR" in big letters across the back. I asked him if he was an instructor and he said, "no, this is just to attract chicks".
His T-shirt also said "instructor" on it. His gear consisted of a twin AL-80 setup that looked to be a pretty good approximation of a DIR rig and he mentioned that he was "going DIR". In the Netherlands, however, the only "official" DIR config for light technical diving is a twin 12L steel setup. The DIR crowd have an allergy for the twin AL-80 setup because of balance issues. So I asked him about that. He said, "yeah, I know but the bigger tanks make me look like more of a man".
I thought it was a joke but he was serious.
This, combined with the "instructor" jacket started giving me alarm bells. When we got geared up I saw that he didn't do a buddy check so I went to ask about that. He said he had to skip the buddy check because his buddy "couldn't understand his gear". So I said I would do it. He said to me, "I'm sure you've never seen gear like this either", to which my response was, "you would be surprised the kind of things I see" (which was actually a carefully camouflaged comment about him, not his gear). He conceded, we finished the safety check and then headed to the water.
After a short swim out to where we would descend I got everyone buddied up and we descended to the bottom where we would get organized and buddies who weren't diving with me would go their separate ways. Once on the bottom, however, the first thing I needed to do is to help "Mr Tecrec-40/DIR/Instructor" get "unturtled" because he lost it during the descent and was firmly planted with his gigantic AL-80's in the mud. LOL. It was everything I could do not not laugh out loud.
So yeah, there's more to this story about what happened on the surface interval but the point I was trying to make is that someone having "attitude" does not always mean that they know what they're doing.
R..
