No more insta-buddies

[orm]

You are WAY to analytical for me. Holy crap. Hopefully referring to you as analytical wasn't offensive. I apologize in advance if it were.

Haha, ok...

Heard on a dive boat near you:

"Hi, Mike, this is John, your Insta-buddy."

"OK, if you and your Insta-buddy can stay at the back."

"Be sure to stay near your insta-buddy on the safety stop."

And you're telling me that this isn't sounding derogatory to you?

You either have a loose grip on the language or you're deluding yourself a little bit.

 

[TSandM]

I think it's mildly derogatory, and that negative connotation comes from experiences like the one that sparked this thread.

I have very little experience with instabuddies. I've had four that were truly random. Two were fine, but it wasn't the kind of teamwork I have with regular buddies (is it ever?) One was fine, but a subsequent dive with the same person was awful. And one (in which it was I who was the "instabuddy") was very stressful for me, because the two gracious people who allowed me to come along with them apparently never had any intention of staying together, and I had to choose which one to follow. None of the experiences was good enough for me to feel the term "instabuddy" was a positive descriptor.

 

[on_two_wheels]

Haha, ok...

Heard on a dive boat near you:

"Hi, Mike, this is John, your Insta-buddy."

"OK, if you and your Insta-buddy can stay at the back."

"Be sure to stay near your insta-buddy on the safety stop."

And you're telling me that this isn't sounding derogatory to you?

You either have a loose grip on the language or you're deluding yourself a little bit.

Personally, I don't think a lot of words are offensive. I don't think those comments are derogatory...I think they're reaching. It's this kind of thinking that led to hyphenating everyone's nationality in this country (US). Suddenly few people are American. Now they're mexican-american, african-american, italian-american, asian-american and so on. Teddy Roosevelt was right but no one listened.

So if "insta-buddies" offends people I'll make an effort to not use it in posts. I'll cater to the ultra-sensitive, too. I'm allowed to use it when I am one, right?

 

[EastTNDiver]

Personally, I don't think a lot of words are offensive. I don't think those comments are derogatory...I think they're reaching. It's this kind of thinking that led to hyphenating everyone's nationality in this country (US). Suddenly few people are American. Now they're mexican-american, african-american, italian-american, asian-american and so on. Teddy Roosevelt was right but no one listened.

So if "insta-buddies" offends people I'll make an effort to not use it in posts. I'll cater to the ultra-sensitive, too. I'm allowed to use it when I am one, right?

There's a commentator on a morning radio show I listen to that coined a phrase I find fitting these days...the "United States of the Offended".

 

[on_two_wheels]

I'd say that's pretty accurate. Of course, the most vocal of the offended on this thread is listed as being in Mexico. Guess it's contagious.

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

I think the guy (with his 200 dives) was probably a solo diver mostly, probably never had any close calls or threatening situations, had a certail level of comfort in the water, and really didn't know how to be a good buddy. It sounds like he was independantly minded and had the same ocean same day attitude. He probably had some bad habits that he just made do with, and figured a loose grouping was good enough and if you were to have said something about your concerns afterward he'd be like "What! ?".

I suspect this really gets to the heart of the matter. Usually when you pair up with someone and have a problem it isn't due to a lack of diving skills, it's due to either a lack of awareness or an incompatible attitude about what it means to be a dive buddy.

Perhaps that's because during their training the emphasis is placed on what to do, and not so much on how to do it ...

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[MXGratefulDiver]

At some point the person you get in the water with becomes a liability..

Not necessarily ... the vast majority of the people I get in the water with have never become a liability. But for the most part, that's because we put an emphasis on knowing what to expect from each other before we begin the dive.

Most of the time the difference between a great buddy experience and a poor one boils down to communication ... you can't talk underwater, so you have to establish expectations before the dive ... then have enough self-discipline to stick to what you talked about.

That's what they mean by "Plan your dive and dive your plan."

... Bob (Grateful Diver)

 

[Leejnd]

I had an insta-buddy this weekend. He was a newer diver, only 14 dives, so at first I was a little leery given that my worst insta-buddy experiences have been with newer divers. As soon as I was asked by the DM to buddy with him, we sat down and had a nice pre-dive chat about what being a buddy means to each of us. Fortunately we shared the same attitude - that when you agree to be a buddy, you do a buddy dive, not two solo dives in proximity to each other. We did a full pre-dive gear check, discussed hand signals, who would lead, dive plan and goals, navigation strategy, gas management, lose-your-buddy procedures, etc. All three dives went perfectly - he was an excellent insta-buddy, with outstanding underwater communication, buddy awareness, and pretty spot-on buoyancy control for having so few dives! We did blue-water safety stops, and he held them perfectly. I was damn impressed!

By the way, we both referred to each other as our "insta-buddy". It was not a pejorative - it was simply a description of what was going on. I think a couple of you need to crank the power down on your sensitivity chips.

 

[Bubbletrubble]

I had an insta-buddy this weekend. He was a newer diver, only 14 dives, so at first I was a little leery given that my worst insta-buddy experiences have been with newer divers. As soon as I was asked by the DM to buddy with him, we sat down and had a nice pre-dive chat about what being a buddy means to each of us. Fortunately we shared the same attitude - that when you agree to be a buddy, you do a buddy dive, not two solo dives in proximity to each other. We did a full pre-dive gear check, discussed hand signals, who would lead, dive plan and goals, navigation strategy, gas management, lose-your-buddy procedures, etc. All three dives went perfectly - he was an excellent insta-buddy, with outstanding underwater communication, buddy awareness, and pretty spot-on buoyancy control for having so few dives! We did blue-water safety stops, and he held them perfectly. I was damn impressed!

With newer divers (<20 dives), I have to say that my insta-buddy experiences have been in line with what Leejnd described. There's a lot of communication that goes on in pre-dive discussions. It ensures that we're on the same page, and it sets us up for success on a dive. It also models good buddy behavior to the newer diver.

I have only had a couple of negative insta-buddy experiences in my diving history. They occurred when I was a novice. I believe that those incidents (nothing serious at all) occurred because I wasn't assertive enough to suggest/insist that we as a team should talk about this stuff before splashing in. Coincidentally, in both cases, my insta-buddies had more experience than I did.

 

[Jax]

I had an insta-buddy this weekend. . . . - he was an excellent insta-buddy, with outstanding underwater communication, buddy awareness, and pretty spot-on buoyancy control for having so few dives! We did blue-water safety stops, and he held them perfectly. I was damn impressed!

By the way, we both referred to each other as our "insta-buddy". It was not a pejorative - it was simply a description of what was going on. I think a couple of you need to crank the power down on your sensitivity chips.

I've had a few insta-buddies. One thought that being my buddy was a God-Given right to tell me how to dive. One was up front about SOSD. (I was okay with that.) The others were quite marvelous . . . My favorite is still the yellow one.

I do not perceive insta-buddy as derogatory. I do, however, have some trepidation because when they are bad, they're bad.