Issue 13 Are You Out of Your Depth? from the Archives of the Tanked Up Magazine

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23 November 2024

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ISSUE 13 ARCHIVE - ARE YOU OUT OF YOUR DEPTH?
You've read the preamble, now do the quiz: Q1) Deep Thought Your partner is having some trouble with the questions on a PADI exam. What will you do to help? A) Recap on what they already know by talking though some options with them, and help expand on any topics they're unsure of. B) Tell them to tick option C for every question. C) Split up with them for being so stupid. Q2) Deep Purple You're on a liveaboard and due to an unlikely series of events are the only diver aboard with an MP3 player. What will you, the DJ, play over the sound system during the week? A) An eclectic mix of songs tailored to the occasion; more upbeat tunes before dives and some chill-out tracks for the evenings. B) Obscure conceptual art mostly consisting of harps, sawing, and the wailing of oppressed refugees in Kurdistan. C) Non-stop X-factor Christmas number ones whilst continually dragging people away from their books / breakfast to dance. Q3) Deep South You seek advice on which flippers and goggles to buy for an entry-level dive course in an online forum, and are inundated with a flood of abusive and sarcastic responses from an illiterate mob that seems to do most of its diving on the internet. How do you respond? A) Apologise for causing any offence but point out you're new to the sport and you feel the response hasn't been that helpful. B) Join a right-wing religious group in the United States and campaign to have the internet switched off. C) Change your online persona, pretend to have a beard and join in with the attacks using emoticons for punctuation. Q4) Deep Vein Thrombosis You are in the belly of a giant, wing-ed beast and various humans are conducting the pre-flight safety briefing. What do you do? A) Ignore it. Switch off your phone and continue reading a book. You've seen them a thousand times before and know where the exits are. B) Take notes and continually interrupt with a series of questions. C) Continually interrupt with a series of sarcastic and cheerfully moronic remarks in the mistaken belief that you're the only one who realises a seatbelt is unlikely to be of much use if the wings fall off at 30,000 feet.
Q5) Deep-Fried Mars Bar Today is the day you plan to do your deepest ever tech-dive, which will involve some serious decompression time. What's for breakfast? A) Cereal, juice and some rashers of bacon on toast with a cup of tea. Should be enough to keep your energy, spirits and body temperature up whilst you hang on a line at 6m. B) Prayer, superstition, and emotional phone calls to loved ones to tell them you're not sure how much you like diving, so there mustn't be any elegiac references to "dying doing what they loved" at your funeral. C) Two full English Breakfasts with side orders of vindaloo and a cauldron of coffee to offset last night's fifteen pints. The look on your buddy's face when they unzip your drysuit after the dive will be hilarious, particularly if you've followed through. More than once. Q6) Deep-Freeze It's mid-February and you're about to embark on a training dive in the 4°C waters of an inland dive site. What exposure protection measures have you taken? A) Nice thick neoprene drysuit with heated undershirt, dry gloves, hood, thermals, and hand warmers in your boots. B) Faking a heart attack two minutes before you get in and having a nice, warm bed-bath in the hospital. C) Diving only in your pants to prove you're not some sort of fairy. Q7) Deep Sleep Your cabin on a tropical liveaboard is at the back, by the engines. As a result, it can be a bit noisy in the mornings as the boat heads to the first dive site of the day or if it needs to travel through the night. What will you do to get some sleep? A) Take some blankets and sleep on the deck. It's not too cold and the beauty of the sunrise is rivalled only by the majesty of the night sky. B) Miss all the dives and complain about the fact that you had to miss all the dives. Also, the foreign food has given you a poorly tummy and the sun's too hot. And something about midges. C) Get some earplugs. Use them to sabotage the engine on the first night so that you spend a restful week repeatedly diving the nursery check-dive site. Q8) Depth Charge In a series of events as regrettable as they are improbable, you find yourself on a boat with a couple of newlyweds, when only the husband returns to the boat after a particular dive. How do you respond when interviewed by police? A) Be as helpful as possible, pointing out any unusual behaviour you might have seen the couple display but making a concerted effort to remain impartial. B) Assume you are being falsely accused and attempt to hang yourself with your shoelaces when both detectives are out of the room. C) Say that she deserved it. They all do.
Q9) Deep Blue The local dive shop needs a new lick of paint and they've inexplicably chosen you to get the job done. What will you do? A) Paint it a nice tropical shade of blue. It's a bit predictable but it gets people in the mood. B) Panic. Get the money up front and accidentally spend it on a two-week bender. Redecorate the dive shop including the windows with some Mr Men wallpaper you forgot to do the kids' bedrooms with. C) Refurbish the store with state-of-the-art, phenomenally expensive yet useless technology, and then relocate the shop brick by brick to Beijing to take advantage of expanding Asian markets. Q10) Deep Impact You find yourself starring in a Hollywood blockbuster in which an asteroid is heading towards Earth, threatening to etc. and so on and so forth. What will you do? A) Make a reasoned assessment of all available scientific data and based on this, race against time to inform as many people as possible that a disaster is impending and that they must find shelter and prepare as well as they can for an extended period of environmental catastrophe. B) Run at it with a stick. C) Find an improbable way to shoehorn scuba diving into the plot via some sort of tenuous link to melting ice on comets or something and lead a team of divers off into space to save the Earth, the implausibility of which still aggravates me 13 years after Armageddon was released. Q11) Depths of Despair A friend is feeling extremely depressed. What will you do to help? A) Lend a sympathetic ear and, providing the dive doc gives the all-clear, take them on a diving weekend to have fun and sample some of "nature's Prozac". B) Buy them some gifts to cheer them up: a bottle of sleeping pills; a packet of razor blades; and a bottle of cheap gin. C) Tell them to snap out of it and slap them. Q12) Deep Diver Preening, Portuguese, Pisspant Prima Donna Cristiano Ronaldo is on your dive boat. What do you do? A) All of the below. B) Walk near him and watch as he throws himself to the floor clutching his head and actually pretends to cry for 35 minutes. C) Hit him repeatedly in the face with a spanner. Q13) Deep Throat It's club night and another member of your dive club requests permission to sex you. How do you respond? A) Acquiesce, given that they're your spouse, but make them buy you a couple of beers first. B) Go into shock and wait for the ambulance to arrive. C) Escort them from the premises and inform the correct authorities. Q14) Deep Heat The dive van goes missing. The cops are trying to make you for the perp and threaten a three to five stretch in the state pen on a grand theft auto felony rap. What do you do? A) Politely explain that you're English and that none of that makes sense. B) Go to prison. Prove you're top dog by starting a fight with the most dangerous looking person you can find in there on your first day. Get hospitalised by them and have your sentence doubled. C) Do a deal with the feds. Wake up before you find out what a fed is. Pre-emptively take care of any potential problems by stealing the dive van and setting fire to it in a park. Award yourself a million billion points for every A), an evening with Simon Cowell for every B), and minus three points for every C). How did you do? More than minus 42 points: You and your wishy-washy "principles" and "reason". You have no idea how to make it in the real world and Climate Change is a liberal conspiracy against the Bible. You were out of your depth when you accidentally stood in a puddle of cat's wee when you got out of bed this morning. You don't own a cat. Evenings with Cowell: You deserve them. Minus 42 points: If something needs to be done, it's you that will be doing the doing. You are a leader of men, beater-upper of not-men, person that deals with the gas bill, and runner-up in your primary school Connect 4 competition. If someone offers you cake and you don't want the cake, you won't eat the cake, even if the cake was a special cake made by the person offering the cake to you, who's the partner of the host (your cake-eating boss).
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