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Jammer wrote: > The important point I was making, indeed, the issue that is, to me, the > heart of this matter, is that there is only one person who has any > business breathing off my tank. RatDiver <75363.767@co*.co*> answered (Subject: Nitrox stickers and ownership):- > No one has any business breathing off your tank. They could get hurt. ... > You need to take reasonable care to ensure that forseeably preventable > accidents don't occur. I put vodka in a water bottle and keep it in my > fridge. What can I expect to happen? Same as once that I read of, when an #@&$ idiot cleaner-woman kept strong lye (= strong caustic soda and soap solution) in a lemonade bottle, and a thirsty little girl drank it thinking from the label that it was lemonade, and it burnt her larynx out. Same as in a factory repair-shop where I worked once, where the foreman said there was no need to label the oil containers - until one day I put hydraulic oil instead of paraffin [= kerosene] into a blowlamp. Then they labelled all the containers pretty smartish. [Hereinafter I am going by older British industrial cylinder colours.] In the long ages when sport divers have used air only, they have got far too casual about cylinder colours. Time was once when aqualung cylinders in Britain were almost always grey with black-and-white top quarters, that being the standard colour for breathing air. (Plain grey was industrial compressed air for power tools etc.) But ever since aqualung filling stations have come everywhere so divers don't have to go to industrial cylinder fillers and testers such as British Oxygen any more. I have seen aqualung cylinders yellow (chlorine), blue (argon or nitrogen), once even a striped brown pattern that correctly meant `carbon monoxide'. And other people talk about different official colour patterns in different countries. And divers want yellow for obviousness in dark water. It seems that the only good solution is to paint the name of the required gas in the cylinder in clear legible understandable WORDS, not the modern vogue for hieroglyphs. (Of (non-diving) confusing uses of hieroglyphs, two examples that I have come across are:- (1) A lawn-mower where the fast and slow ends of the throttle slider are marked not with the words FAST and SLOW but with a hare and a tortoise. (2) A photocopier where the bright and dark ends of the copy-brightness control are marked not by the words but with a white solid semicircle and a black solid semicircle. (halfmoon shapes -> phases of the moon -> variations in brightness !!!))
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