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Simon,
I'm extremely sorry to hear about your experience. I hope you
reported it to Tim O'Leary at NAUI Tech Ops. The fact is, any large agency
is going to have a few slip through the cracks. It's simply the nature of
the beast. All agencies set standards and do their best to police them. But
unfortunately human beings are sometimes swayed by friendships, business
affiliations, money, etc. It happens. Until the guilty party gets caught,
primarily via a student filing a complaint, the situation continues and the
problem mushrooms. The smaller the agency, the easier it is to maintain a
strict quality control. The larger the agency the tougher the job is.
Frankly, I don't envy a job like Tom Mount's . IANTD is a very large
organization. It didn't get that way by providing a bad service to
customers. The training I had with them and the instructors were quite
thorough. Still, I have no doubt some bad eggs exist. I can only imagine
that quality assurance is a nightmarish job.
Look at PADI, while not particularly revelent to technical dive training,
it is an enormous organization. And we all know that there are a lot of
instructors out there cutting corners, taking short-cuts and in general not
doing their students justice. They're difficult to catch. The governing
body can't just act upon the word of one person. It takes some reasonable
evidence for them to act upon the complaint. Yet gathering such evidence is
tough. Most people have a "I don't wanna be a snitch" attitude. Students
usually don't have anything to compare to to know if they've "been had" or
not, so they seldom file complaints.
NAUI Tech Ops is certainly smaller, but I don't envy Tim O'Leary's job
just the same. GUE is smaller yet, but I wouldn't want JJ's job either. The
fact remains, the more fruit you have in the basket, the better the chance
that there's a few rotten apples in the lot.
The larger the organization the more difficult it is for the leaders to
have a direct relationship with the "members." It's impossible for them to
know eveyone personally. Still, when I've had a question or problem with
NAUI Tech Ops, it's always been Tim O'Leary himself on the other end of the
line. Not some middle management person. While not affiliated with IANTD,
I've had many questions about that organization answered directly by Tom
Mount. That tends to give me the impression that these poeple do care and
are trying. I couldn't even imagine calling PADI HQ and getting a direct
heart to heart with Cronin.
As I've said before, there's more to this than the agency involved. The
instructor plays a major role in the quality of any training program. An
agency can have the highest standards in the world and a bad instructor will
still provide sub-standard program. Pick the instructor, not the agency.
This community is still realitively small. It's not all that tough to get a
a few recommendations concerning who's who. If you do error and end up with
a bad instructor, by all means report it. While you may never know it, you
may very well save someone their life by doing so.
Good luck,
Bob D.
****You wrote****
Bob,
I was staying out of this discussion as I would rather be learning about
pulmonary tox and
deco schedules, but I couldnt resist.
> In the technical diving field choosing a quality instructor is extremely
> important. The agency of affilation can be a bit of an indicator, but it's
> certainly not the last word. I know that both NAUI and GUE are pretty picky
> about who they endorse as technical instructors... i.e. that gives the
> potential student a clue.
My rec courses had been through NAUI so when I started out tech diving, I
naively looked
for a NAUI tech center. I found the only South African one listed in the
NAUI.tec home
page, the head instroketor is, if I recall correctly, a NAUI technical
instructor
instructor. Included in the completely useless bundle of courses that I
signed up for was
blender and gas mixer.
The course consisted of a photocopied set of notes and a 30 min demo at his
nitrox
blending panel during which time I was told that at any moment, the whole
thing could blow
sky-high and probably a total of 10 hours standing next to the compressor
watching the
amount of helium being fed through it into the 300 bar cylinders. Not a word
about
compressibility of helium. The exam was an old TDI paper.... So much for
carefully
endorsed.
In the end, I never bothered to collect a single one of the many c-cards that
I bought
from him. I would be embarrassed to show them to anybody, you may as well
have "Stroke"
tattooed on your forehead.
Simon
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