Discount Brain Surgery
We are now offering discount brain surgery! Do you need a blood clot removed, or an epileptic seizure center eliminated? Talk to us for great prices. No one does it cheaper than us.
How do we do it? Some of our brain surgeons are new, and operate “to gain experience”. Others are just not very good and have no alternatives. We also cut a few corners when it comes to servicing, sterilizing and calibrating or surgery tools. Some of which aren’t that new either. But it’s okay, trust us. Think about the discount!
This seems to be the attitude in parts of the scuba teaching industry. Parts! Of course there are great, reputable, safe dive shops. Others seem to have embraced the spirit of our hypothetical brain surgery clinic above. And, it’s a hen-and-egg type of situation: a lot of prospective scuba students seem to be primarily interested in a cheap courses, not quality, reputable training. These keep the aforementioned cheap-first dive shops in business.
If you see a scuba course which is surprisingly cheap, ask yourself: is everyone involved getting paid a reasonable salary? Or is a new instructor being scammed into working for free? How in shape is the equipment of the dive shop, including safety equipment you might not even see dung your course? There are several reasons why diving instructors work for very little, or even free: a lack of alternatives, the aforementioned “gaining experience”, an instructor might be independently wealthy or have a pension and doesn’t need the money, or a dive shop owner might teach a course himself to build a customer base for his shop (usually the cheap-o customers will go somewhere else as soon as they find something cheaper). All not great reasons which will keep top qualified, motivated instructors in business.
A good statement I heard from a dive shop owner in the Philippines: When asked for a 30% discount on a scuba course, his reply was “which third of the course do you not want to do?”. Of course not every discount is a cause for concern: big groups, repeat customers, or a limited-time promo are all very reasonable. And of course, a backpacker-style dive shop will be cheaper than a luxury resort’s dive shop. But you get the idea: consistently surprisingly super-cheap prices should make a prospective diving client wonder. Where do the savings come from?
Un-ethical underwater behavior, like in this video, can also be a negative consequence of poor diving training.
Even a beginner scuba diving course takes you to a depth of up to 18 meters. That’s 18 meters of seawater between you and air which you can breathe. Except the air in the tank on your back, of course, which you can breathe via a mechanism, which might (rarely, but still) malfunction. Learning to scuba dive is learning a survival skill. Saving on the price of a scuba course might not be the first priority when choosing such a course.
On a side note: it always particularly surprises me when tourists who spend 1000s of $s to fly to the Philippines from another continent and to stay in fancy hotels start haggling over 10s of $s for scuba training. I believe it’s decades of brainwashing by advertising in the mass media which have elevated a discount to the status of a moral victory.
Quiz: The cover image somewhat looks like the surface of the cortex in a mammalian brain, imaged, and false-color displayed. It’s something else. What is it?
