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Cyber-Divers,
In my "So long, and thanks for all the fish" message I mentioned a
couple of reasons why I was taking the "Cave Diving List" down. One of
the paragraphs stated:
'It also seems that a good friend of mine is upset because of
comments I have personally made about the transpack and
neutralite. It seems that these comments are being taken as
personal attacks, and unfortunatly he has friends in high places
at Dive Rite. He has informed me that he doesn't want to have me
"bite the hand that feeds me", or something to that effect.'
This paragraph seems to have started a series of events, including
"numeris"(tm) people accusing Dive Rite of wrong-doing. I keep looking
at this paragraph over and over again, and it really doesn't seem to
me that I am implying anything about actions taken by Dive Rite.
Let's analyze this paragraph sentence by sentence and try to sort
this out.
'It also seems that a good friend of mine is upset because of
comments I have personally made about the transpack and
neutralite'.
Well, this particular sentence implies to me that a person that I
(Ken Sallot) consider a friend is upset because I've made some
comments about Dive Rite products.
'It seems that these comments are being taken as personal
attacks, and unfortunatly he has friends in high places
at Dive Rite'.
Well, this sentence implies that these comments I've made are
being taken as personal attacks. The message I received from
my friend had this quote in it (*NOTE* this was a private
email message to me, and has never been made public before!)
'I just called Lamar to thank him for letting me
use his stuff. He asked if Ken Sallot was the guy
I went diving with this weekend and I said "yeah".
He asked if Ken, who was trashing the Transpac and
nutralites on the list was the same Ken that borrowed
his scooter this weekend.'
The way this was phrased, "He asked if Ken who was trashing..."
implied to me that Lamar was taking this stuff personally. I
suppose this might have been a rash judgement on my part, maybe
not.
The last sentence:
'He has informed me that he doesn't want to have me
"bite the hand that feeds me", or something to that effect.'
It refers to a paragraph in this again private email message where
my friend asked me to not "bite the hand that feeds you". He was
not referring to my work at all, instead to the loan of certain
gear, namely a Tekna DV-3x.
Now I did go on record and say,
'I hope that Dive Rite Mfg, inc. takes to heart some of
the complaints with their products here on the net.
Rather then saying, "You guys are trashing us", it would
be nice to see them say, "Ok, we think there might be
some valid points, we'll look into it".'
and I still stand behind that statement. It does seem that Lamar
at least is conscious of what is being posted to the Cavers List.
As a matter of fact I know for a fact that certain Dive Rite
people are subscribers to the list. I do hope that Dive Rite does
take some heart in the comments made about their products. The
comments made are out of genuine concern as paying customers.
Example, I am not satisfied with any of the Dive Rite reels. None
of them. I have an option for "safety" reels, which is to use a
Ralph Hood reel rather then the "Blue" reel. I do use the Ralph
Hood because it's a better reel. Unfortunately I have not found
a decent gap (jump) reel on the market. The older Lexan Dive Rite
gap reel was much better then the current one, not saying it was
perfect, just that the quality has noticeably depreciated with this
particular product.
Rather then they insinuating that I was trashing them, it would
be nice if they would actively take part and realize that the people
making these complaints are paying customers. We will shop for the
best product we can find. And if we find a product that is superior
for the same price, word of mouth does get around.
As for why I took the list down. I had a co-worker here who was a
subscriber to the list. He was giving me a lot of crap about the
"mud slinging" that went on the list. This was making my life
miserable regarding work. To put it simply, it just stopped being
a "fun thing to run the cavers list".
This really put me on edge as far as the list was concerned. I was
almost ready to pull the plug on Tuesday when I got back to work
(from one of the best weekends of diving I might add). I was really
close to doing so.
When I received this private email, it was enough to make me pull the
plug. At that point I came to the conclusion that I had had enough of
dealing with the "Cavers List". It was getting to be too much of a
distraction from work. As Gene Broome said to me on Monday,
"Don't these people on these lists have a life?". There was too much
crap involved with keeping it sane that I don't want to deal with it.
I also felt that no one was getting any useful information at all
from the list because of the real low signal to noise ratio.
About two months ago, maybe three, I asked Paul Smith if he would
like to be a "co-moderator". I felt that I was unfortunatly biased
towards the NACD and wanted someone on the "other side of the fence"
to help run the show. That way anything I slipped up on, they would
be able to take over. I gathered that he turned me down on this
because I never got a response from him on it.
After the barrage of email I received today (and telephone calls),
I think I'm going to continue the list. I was really surprised by
the amount of people who said, "I really learned something from
the cavers list". If this list can help to keep one person alive,
then I guess it's a good thing.
However, I can not do it by myself. JR from Techdiver just lets
his list run on auto-pilot. This doesn't seem to work well all the
time. I'm looking for someone else to be "sherriff", at least for
awhile. I have one or two people in mind. I actually may have multiple
people as list moderators. I have already appointed Carl Heinzl
as a co-moderator (cgh@ma*.ai*.mi*.ed*).
This message I guess is forming into a "Welcome back to the cavers
list". So, I'll send it out as the first message when I bring the
mail server back online tonight.
Ken Sallot
Cavers List Moderator
--
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Ken Sallot "High ppO2's can be hazardous to your health"
CIRCA - Ronnie Bell
(904) 392-2007
kens@uf*.ed*
http://grove.ufl.edu/~ken
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