What to do when an instructor is out of line?

[gcbryan]

Yeah, you had me too until the police thing.

It's assault if you feel threatened as in battery is likely to follow.

 

[seaducer]

Yeah, you had me too until the police thing.

It's assault if you feel threatened as in battery is likely to follow.

In my jurisdiction that is called "Terroristic threats". IE language that is designed to incite terror in somebody.

Being insulted in NJ is not a crime, its an expectation

 

[Puffer Fish]

What is wrong? If the above instructor was diving different environments and working with different instructors plenty of experience can be gained. 100 dives is 66% more than base for DM (60 dives). 100 is not a trivial amount of dives. (I am at 140 mark within my first year and have quite decent amount of training and dive experience in different dive conditions and places.) I am midway of my DM training. I think that just the fact I managed to do this within a year instead of taking 3 years to do it should not count against it.

Tell me what is bad about the above professional scuba resume?

Nothing without knowing a bit more, like where the dives were, the conditions and how much time. Just doing the same dive over and over again would be the concern.

 

[iztok]

Nothing without knowing a bit more, like where the dives were, the conditions and how much time. Just doing the same dive over and over again would be the concern.

Exactly!

I have less then a year of diving experience (140 dives) but I dove in Thailand (Similan and Phi Phi), NC and SC coast (wreck diving), NC quarries, FL Keys, and SoCal (Catalina Islands) as well as NorCal (Monterey) in this timeframe. Dove with different people and different environments from 1ft (or less) to 100+ft visibility, from 45F to 80+F water temp.

 

[RJP]

Being insulted in NJ is not a crime, its an expectation

Q: "How many NJ divers does it take to screw-in a light bulb?"

A: "F--K YOU!"

:shocked2:

 

[SC_Hoaty]

Lastly, the reason this thread started was that the CD questioned my judgement pretty hard and tried to make me think I had screwed up somehow to justify the berating. I wanted experienced outside opinions to evaluate my course of action and validate my response to the dive issue. I got that... and am greatful for it.

However, the responses are based upon your presentation of the situation. Others have noted that the "other side of the story" has not been heard. Sort of reminds me of Perry Mason, when you thought you knew who was guilty, until the defense presented their case. (Boy, did I just date myself with that Perry Mason reference! )

This is not to dispute a word you have said - just to acknowledge how large the "grain of salt" may be after all these pages.

Being insulted in NJ is not a crime, its an expectation

Having been born and raised in the Garden State, I concur!

 

[elmer fudd]

I'm not an instructor, so I am not going to comment on that aspect of the situation. But this is why I prefer diving side-by-side, rather than lead-and-follow, especially in low viz or with unfamiliar dive buddies. If the person in the back runs into problem, it is too easy to lose them.

That's why in a lead and follow situation it's in your best interests to be the leader. As a follower, you're always the leaders buddy, but he's only your buddy if you're able to catch up with him.

 

[pj5]

RUN AWAY! Sounds more like a certificate mill than a dive shop. Most dive shops will encourage you to acquire more certificates. Maybe because of the money they get from the classes, but more likely because of the business they get from the students needing this or that piece of gear from the dive shop. That's not what has me thinking certificate mill.

It's the trip to a location four hours away to knock off the diving portion of several classes with an insufficient number of dive instructors and DMs to separate the dives by dive profile and skill level. OW skills dive and AOW deep dive are about as incompatible as two dive objectives can get. Bad judgement call if it was decided to have one dive for these two groups at the last minute due to staffing shortages. Completely ridiculous if that was how it was planned from inception. Either way, a sign of cluelessness and incompetance...not the attributes I'm looking for in an organization that is supposed to teach me how to dive in a safe manner.

When I got certified, I did open water, nitrox, and DEMP. Wanting to hone my newly acquired skills, I was eyeballing AOW, navigation, and rescue. And my pals at the dive shops encouraged my eagerness to take more classes. But I decided I hadn't actually acquired any skills yet and would get more out of the additional classes after I logged a lot more dive time...enough to acquire some skills and make them second nature. Thank goodness for the influence of the much more skilled divers I worked with at the time. I got in some really nice 4-5 dive per day Caribbean trips with all the money I would have spent on classes that would have included 2-6 dives in some silty dead pond in or around the Houston area.

 

[deepwater]

yap...yap...yap....It all boils down to 2 choices. 1) suck it up and move on...or 2)take him to the bottom and leave him there. Either way you are the better man. Happy problem solving.

dw

 

[Puffer Fish]

Actually, the bigger point is that everybody IS entitled to due process. I am glad Hotpuppy is insisting that the name of the shop etc. remain unwritten.

On the one hand we have an account of an incident from a very well spoken individual which portrays one party as having done nothing wrong, and behaving extremely honorably given the circumstances.

The other party is almost cartoonishly described in how they behaved. Then later we find out this person has dropped ~6000$ within the last year in the shop, with plans to spend who knows how much more? The LDS owner apparently is willing to lose such a lucrative customer without much of fight, if any.

Does that make ANY sense to anybody?

On the other hand is the rest of the story.

Is it at all possible that things did not transpire exactly the way they have been presented to us

I think the initial events presented most likely did happen something close to as they were presented. But the lead up to why it happened was initially completely missing, then partially filled in. My guess is there is a lot more.

This was not a new student to the shop. While I believe it is completely unprofessional to call a student names, that someone would blow up should be pretty easy to understand.

We have an extremely articulate, verbally skilled student. One who is attempting to get as many dive credentials as possible. A shops dream or nightmare, depending on how that student acts.

One who spends a good deal of money, and one that has attention issues and goes from being a student to being an expert at the drop of a hat. One who has a reason for everything they do.

If you look at the presented details of the first dive and why he did not follow directions, you will notice that at no point did he take responsibility.

Guessing, but some people don't deal well with the student that never makes a mistake. Yes, a good instructor should know how to deal with it, but many don't. I suspect that would explain why no debriefing.

So the instructor, stressed out, blows up over the last piece of straw on his back. But here is the interesting thing, our thread starter also blows up...so we have two humans, one blowing up over a series of small issues, and one blowing up over a single confrontation. Neither side wants to show they were responsible, and neither side wants to give an inch.

I think you can guarentee that everyone in the shop understands why the instructor blew up. They may not think it was the right thing to do, but they understand.

That last dive was a mess, but parts of it don't make any sense. 6 ft of vis, but too far for physical contact? Problem is, both sides of it don't work. An Instructor that looses a student? And does not surface in the time someone can do a safety stop? Ear clearing problems at depth? (Every student I have had that had any ear issue, always told me.. as they are paranoid about it). Don't have a clue what was actually going on, but several things just seem very wrong.

Communication between the shop and the student seems, on the surface, to be terrible. But both the pound of flesh and the "loss of trust" seems way over the top, unless there is a whole bunch of other things going on.

The sad part is that, at some point, the human issues seemed to led to very real safety issues, and that should never have happened.