OK, enough of this hyperbole. Here's the real solution to this situation:

1. Assemble your own cascade system. If you don't know how, you shouldn't 
be doing it anyway.

2. Patronize your local non-stroke dive shop. Spend enough dough and 
pretty soon you are in the "good 'ol boys" club and you can do your own 
mixes, and most of the time not even have to pay for them. Maybe you will 
even get to stand around to huf-and-puf, pontificate and dole out 
bullshit to the newbies and impress them with your god-like skills.

3. When out of town, seek out a local dive shop, find out who the owner 
is. Shoot the shit with him/her, take him out for a few drinks. Get him 
sloppy drunk, and milk some "true confessions" out of him about screwing 
tourists, or just let him/her cry on your shoulder about what a lousy, 
rotten way it is to make a living running a dive shop. Then hit him at 
the shop first thing the next morning, and there you go. Tell the lackies 
to fuck off and demand to talk to your new found buddy if he's hiding in 
the back nursing his hangover.

As you can see, none of these solutions involve the DOT, OSHA, FBI, CIA, 
HRSD, EPA, UHC or any other gov. agency which will really piss off the 
unions and freakout the anal pencil-pusher armchair type divers out there.

   Jim

On 8/11/97 6:10 PM Steve Lindblom wrote:

>Jim Cobb wrote:
>>A few items I've picked up over the years. SNIP
>
>
>Good solid commonsense post, Jim. But we'll forgive you this once.
>
>I suspect in the next few years, nitrox will go one of two ways -
>completely dedicated gear, ala Scubapro, or a more commonsense approach,
>where tanks will be checked for contamination, more in the way they are
>visualled now, rather than cleaned whether they need it or not, and shops
>will use O2 safe lubes routinely. Shops will realize that their air is
>clean enough with decently maintained normal filtration that they can stop
>worrying that someone might come in with a little residual O2 in their
>tank, and people will have realized that a tankful or two of good but not
>perfect air is not going to contaminate a tank. O2 clean labels will be
>accepted casually, without worrying about who did it, what agency, when and
>did they really do it right, the way visual stickers are now (it's funny if
>you think about it, the dangers from filling a defective tank are much
>greater and better documented than the dangers of putting O2 in an unclean
>tank, yet visuals are done incredibly casually, and I've never seen a dive
>shop quibble over a visual sticker no matter where it came from).
>
>Ideally, it would be nice if someone would come up with a simple test for
>hydrocarbons, so a tank could simply be checked. Actually, there is
>already, and its called the human eye, but since people persist in the germ
>theory of hydrocarbons (the invisible killer!) they have a hard time
>accepting something that simple.
>If you think about it, the situation is pretty nutty now - telling us we
>have to pay to have brand new tanks cleaned to remove hazards that cannot
>be seen or detected?
>And that we cannot do it ourselves, even though it's just a matter of soap
>and water, because we have not been annointed by the agency? That sounds
>more like religion than science.
>Ditto the shops that will not accept anyone else's O2 sticker but insist on
>redoing it themselves, as if it's brain surgery or something. Nice racket -
>charging for something no one knows if they really need, nor can tell if
>its been done.
>
>Alas, if I had to bet on which of the two paths will win out, I'd have to
>bet on the former - if there's one rule of technology you can count on, its
>that the worse of two alternative usually prevails (this being written on a
>Mac, on the day after Apple expired). I hesitated before spending the money
>(all $120 of it) to set up my own nitrox capability, thinking that it was
>only a matter of time before it got so cheap and available it wouldn't be
>worth home brewing, but in retrospect I'm glad I went ahead now, as the
>availablity increases, so does the lunacy surrounding it.
>
>
>
>
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