It seems we have had a number of family or friends show up in threads lately. Most of us know the TOS, but you know when someone shows up and say that was my daughter, well it is a little harder to just stick to tearing apart the dive. I think many feel that we can pick up the matter in another thread.
It is frustrating to want to talk about an incident and have the discussion shut down. I can tell you my Dad was a fool for not having a colonoscopy (sp?) done and now he is dead. It will be 8 years next week since we lost him, but you know in the days after he died it would have been a little hard for me to hear. So I think it is out of some sense of respect.
People often confuse Scuba Board with the internet. And Scuba Board is not the internet. It is a community. Sure we are all very different and live all over the place. DORKS, DIR, MOF, NMOF but at the end of the day we are a community. Even those I have had very strong arguments with would help me in time of need.
A few weeks ago, I started a thread. I participated in the morning, but my day was very busy and it was late in the evening until I could get back to it. I am not sure what went on during the day, but someone had my back, and more importantly the back of this community that I love so dearly. Posts that were out of line were removed and this discussion continued.
Sometimes we just need to let a thread go and revive the discussion elsewhere. I work in a business where most of the people I work with are less fortunate than I am. About two weeks ago a former employee was found dead downtown behind a building. A couple of months ago another employee’s father became like a piece of cheese on and shedder when his bike got hung under and 18 wheeler. In all of those cases and too many more to name, I have very definite thoughts about what went wrong. But when I talk to their families I show respect. I would like to warn others or keep myself from such a fate, but there is a time and place to do that. If the family or close friends come into our community or cyber home, it just isn’t the time and place.
I have said more than one time that I think I owe my life to this community and the lessons learned by reading the accident threads. There was a dive I feel very strongly that I would not have pulled out of had I not read these threads on this very board. I remember thinking, I am doing all the wrong things and making the same mistakes that so and so did and I must stop right now. But with that being said, and I still have SO SO SO MUCH to learn, I still need to be respectful of those who join our community. My right/need to learn does not outweigh my need to be a good community member.
Perhaps we can provide some comfort or some understanding to those people. Perhaps not. In the thread I mentioned in the previous paragraph a family member did in fact show up. I remember him well, a very rational reasoned young man. He was really having a hard time understanding what went wrong and what mistake his family member might have made. Sometimes it is just too much for others to hear and if it is we can find another thread to talk about it.
If there is a thread that is shut down due to the condolences, I can extract many of the details and take the what ifs over into the basic scuba forum and others will follow me or you to such a thread. It would be nice if we could keep everything in a neat package, but since we have people with real feelings that loved the real people that we are talking about, the rules are not always set in stone. Perhaps things in the Scuba Board community tend to be set in neoprene---flexible, will protect and keep you warm, not always pretty and sometimes smells, but as a community, it is something we cannot afford to live without and more importantly would we want to even try to live without such a mindset???
