I love being an educator and acting as a mentor.
There were so very many things I wanted to know when I was getting started, that I wanted to try and do, but had only limited guidance available. Just as often as not, even worse, I was given bad, incomplete, or totally wrong information which took time to research and correct.
So I enjoy making myself available as a source for those now coming up. Even on those frequent occasions that I don't have the information myself I can point people in the right direction.
This is one of the many things I truly love about my job and feel is the mandate for any instructor: to find and use every opportunity to send better, safer divers out into the wild.
I'm aware that my online persona (possibly my real-life persona, too) is generally that of a curmudgeonly, know-it-all misanthrope... but it comes from a good place.
The old axiom is that with 10,000 hours of engagement comes expertise. (This theory has since been disproven, which explains why there are so many crap instructors out there.) I bring this up because I have been a full-time dive professional and dive safety geek for 8 years now. 8*52*40 = 16,640. Whether that makes me an expert or simply a blowhard who is unemployable at real work is a conundrum I'll have to struggle with in my dotage. But while I may not be an expert... I'm pretty well-equipped in a conversation on our sport.
I walk away from a great many of these conversations shaking my head and wondering why people won't listen and benefit the experience and mistakes others have and have made. Why they'd prefer to make the same -- sometimes dangerous -- mistakes themselves. Why they think they're so bloody clever when people who legitimately are experts are telling them they are doing something silly.
Perhaps it is the personal illusion of expertise that is the dark side of the exhilaration to be a mentor? Vanity and ego. The reason it is so frustrating when you try to help someone and your suggestions are dismissed as ignorant or swatted away like gadflies.
Or perhaps the frustration comes from the fact that among the legitimate experts there are actual deadpools.
There are unofficial lists of people who have been approached, often by several experts, offering mentorship or advice who are generally agreed to be on a fast track to a watery death. It isn't gossip... it is commiseration.
We do talk about you. It is not flattering. You have reputations and nicknames. But even if we don't like you, we do worry about you and don't want to see you hurt or hurt someone else.
Why the hell don't you listen?
