I guess we are different in that regard. I do not fear diving and feel very natural when I do it. I have learned a technique that allows me to do so week in and week out and as long as I adhere to few simple parameters I don't think much can really go wrong, outside circumstances I don't control (great white attack, heart attack etc...).
How do you know when you have stepped over the line from confidence to complacency? I like the idea that a little fear is healthy and keeps me well away from the line. Fear creates my buffer zone. Yes, I suppose we are different in that regard.
Again, the disdain is not against professionals et al. It is against the notion that they have a "rite" to regulate the behavior of others or that only they have the capacity for correct instruction. In the OP's case the debate is whether she overstepped her boundaries by foisting her belief of what was right onto a customer by denying them a service they were otherwise legally entitled to obtain. There is no mandate for a professional to do this, it was a choice.
I thought this was covered extensively earlier in the thread. (That was an attempt at humor--I think we all see that this thread is going around in circles.) My position on this issue is that a business has the right to refuse to do business with a potential customer for any reason the business in its discretion so chooses, so long as it's not something prohibited by law to discriminate on the basis of. That is the law everywhere, as far as I know. In the OP's case, the potential customer was not "legally entitled" to a service, as you put it. Now, the
accepted practice in the industry is for a shop to require no more than a c-card, a tank in hydro/vis, etc.--that has nothing to do with legal entitlement. A shop has an economic motivation to not ask for more, and the potential customer has an economic motivation not to divulge more. This economic motivation should be enough to keep this practice working smoothly for both shops and divers. But as I have said before, once the potential customer opens his big fat mouth and discloses to the dive shop he plans to do something other than personally use the gear to go diving in whatever way is conventional, then I believe the shop now is forced to make a decision as to how it plans to minimize potential risk arising from the disclosure. As I have said above, the shop now faces a dilemma. The shop now possesses the information, and a lawyer might try to use that against the shop if there is ever a lawsuit. Sure, the shop could bet on that not happening--that is one option. The risk is pretty low, we all seem to agree. The shop could go ahead and do business with the customer, and hope that some lawyer doesn't try to argue that the shop's practice is to assume some sort of extra duty of care by performing their own special analysis on a customer's situation, and that in the case at issue the shop failed to meet that duty. But I do not think it is out of line for a shop that has extra information thrust upon them by a potential customer to think about it for a second and make a decision one way or the other. "What is the likelihood of someone getting injured from this?" "What is the likelihood that using what he's told me to make a decision will be raised in a lawsuit?" "How much business might I lose if I choose not to do business with him?" I just don't see how one can fault a business for thinking it through and making a decision. Any type of business would normally do this. Should dive shops rely on the c-card system to shield them completely? It might shield them in some cases but maybe not others. Who knows. None of us has a crystal ball.
If we say it is the instructors duty to interject, where does it end? When they see an obese diver? An old diver? A solo diver? A smoking diver? An OW diver who says they are going to dive a site that is more than 60' deep? And what about maintaining those same standards. If I see an old, obese instructor can I have his license revoked to prevent him/her from engaging in their activity?
I never said there was a "duty to interject." As I said above, I think self-interest usually takes care of everything. But as far as the question of "where does it end," I don't know where it ends. Life is full of gray areas. I see obese and old divers all the time out there. In the US, we see dive industry professionals knowingly allowing OW divers to exceed the PADI recommendation of 60 feet all the time. If I were an instructor or business owner or whatever, I suppose I would try to think of how likely it is that someone suing me would be able to prove that it's the norm in the industry to not deal with obese or old divers, or allow a mere OW diver to exceed 60 feet, or whatever, and I suppose I would conclude that that is unlikely. Now, what if a potential customer walked in and was not only old and obese but was wheezing and coughing up blood? Maybe there is no duty to keep him from hurting himself, but I might intervene anyway. What if the potential customer was frothing at the mouth, waving a speargun, and ranting maniacally about spearing the invading commandos down at the beach? I think everyone has to make difficult decisions now and then. Fortunately for us, the difficult decisions are mostly theoretical. Rarely does anything like this happen. In the OP's case, the risk of anyone getting injured was low, the decision could have gone either way, and I would not indulge in Monday morning quarterbacking over it.
