Issue 7 Can You Handle The Pressure? from the Archives of the Tanked Up Magazine

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4 December 2024

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ISSUE 7 ARCHIVE - CAN YOU HANDLE THE PRESSURE?
Pressure comes in many forms, blah, blah, blah, insert clichés here, are you up to the task, so on and so forth and etc. Now do the quiz: Q1 – Water pressure. At what point do you begin equalising? A) As soon as your head disappears beneath the surface or sometimes even whilst still on the surface just to keep ahead of the game. B) When you first walk down the stairs in the morning. C) At a depth no shallower than 35 metres. This is usually three or four minutes into a refreshing salt-water enema of the middle-ear following the implosion of your eardrums. Q2 – Peer pressure. Some dive buddies ask you to accompany them on a deep dive in water of sufficiently low temperature to require a dry-suit: something you've never used before. How do you react? A) Tell them you'll join them some other time, and in the intervening period take a drysuit course and get some hours of cold-water diving under your belt. Real friends are sure to understand. B) Upon hearing the proposal, surreptitiously excuse yourself for a toilet visit. Once out of sight, sprint to a rubbish dump and hide in an abandoned freezer, from which location you should have ample time before asphyxiating to report these so-called buddies to the police and any roaming armed vigilantes. C) Not wanting to risk any friendships, pretend to have more experience than you do, culminating in the point where you insist everyone reconfigures their equipment according to your instructions and dives your modified plan. This eliminates any danger of losing face at the probable cost of only two or three lives. Q3 – Gas pressure. As they've recently passed their Open Water course, you agree to take your partner's parents, whom you've never met before, diving. Whilst briefing them on the plan, you feel the need to take a little trip to Trumpton. What do you do? A) Hold it in until you're all safely underwater and you can off-gas at will. B) Hold it in for six and a half weeks or until admitted to hospital with a suspected life-threatening blockage. C) Halt the briefing and instruct everyone to be quiet for a moment and then noisily and violently shit your pants.
Q4 – Financial pressure. The owner of your local dive school promises to "cut off one of your nuts" if you don't cough up the £5 you owe him for an air fill. Do you: A) Laugh it off: he's just having a joke with you and besides which you're female and so lack the necessary equipment for removal. B) Pay him back the £5 on the spot plus 600% daily interest and transfer the deeds of your house into his name. C) Laugh along with him for a moment before producing a foot-long, blunt dive knife and messily hacking off your own testicles with a notable lack of surgical skill. Present him with both testes and then invoice him for the outstanding £5. Q5 – Tire Pressure. At what point would you make the call to abort a dive in strenuous conditions? A) When the dive stops being "fun"; ie. when the exertion on you or your buddy causes enough mental or physical discomfort to outweigh the benefits of completing the dive. B) Whilst tucking into a third helping of bacon sarnies at breakfast and the prospect of pulling a wetsuit on over your chubby little ankles brings you out in a sweat. C) Seventeen minutes after being pronounced dead on arrival at the heart attack ward, following an attempt to swim underwater to France against a 40-knot current. Q6 – Blood Pressure. You inexplicably find yourself being the dive guide for a particularly violent wing of Los Angeles based street-gang the "Bloods" who insist you wear a crimson bandana during the dive. As you look particularly un-fetching in red, what will you do? A) Wear it. It's just a bandana and who knows, it might even make for an amusing photo. B) Cringingly paint all of your dive gear red, have your entire body tattooed red, dye your hair red and wear red contact lenses. C) Refuse to wear anything further down the electromagnetic spectrum than green and insist that even your blood is blue. Let your last act in the mortal realm be the feigning of surprise when they shoot you in the face to prove this is not true. Q7 – Pressure Cooker. You're on a liveaboard trip with shouty celebrity chef Gordon Ramsay. On the third day, your painfully-shy other half manages to squeak out an excruciatingly polite and barely audible suggestion that perhaps divers might like to collect a lobster or two on the next dive to eat for dinner that day. Unfortunately, it's the wrong season for lobster fishing and Ramsay makes this clear by standing over your nearest and dearest and screaming four-letter word strewn invective into their face for 27 minutes. What do you do? A) Lead the surly TV chef away and try to calm him down before disappearing below-decks with your spouse and re-commencing sixteen years worth of therapy from scratch. B) Help Ramsay out by slapping your life-partner repeatedly in the face. C) Stab Ramsay in the testicles with a fork, which you were planning to do from the moment you saw him board the boat.
Q8 – Ambient Pressure. Whilst helping out at your local dive school, you notice the owner's tendency to loop whale-song and pan-pipe CDs over the shop's tinny speaker system. Not being a fan of New-Age nonsense, what will you do? A) Put up with it. You can play your own music once you get your own store, and anyway, the poor-quality speakers ensure it never gets loud enough to be intrusive. B) Make more of an effort to enjoy the music by wearing crystals, turning to the stars for ad hoc guidance, smelling things to heal ailments, vaguely believing that the power of something or other means that everything is going to be alright and undergoing a complicated surgical procedure to have the piece of your brain removed that understands science. C) Install a massive set of 3,000 watt speakers and pump death metal through them. When you get sacked, return to the premises fifteen minutes later and bombard them with indignation / Molotov cocktails. Q9 – Atmospheric Pressure. You are hosting a dinner party when the subject of a shark attack that was recently in the news comes up. One of the more influential guests remarks that such creatures are nothing more than an irritating throwback to a previous age and he'll be happier when they're all extinct. As most of the other guests are well aware of your passion for marine conservation, a thick silence descends upon the table. How do you deal with it? A) Offer to serve shark-fin soup as a starter to provoke some much-needed laughter and leave one of the other guests to quietly explain your stance to the gentleman in question. B) Agree wholeheartedly with the man and arrange to go tiger hunting with him in the autumn. Slip out during a quiet moment to switch your car engine and all the house lights on, and make a mental note to only buy fish that's trawler-caught and meat from animals that have been kept in cages and bullied with sticks. C) Laughingly mention that it is the gentleman's opinions that are a throwback to a previous age then stop smiling and threaten to kill his children for converting oxygen to carbon dioxide by breathing. Q10 – Pressure Sores. Halfway through your dive holiday you notice that your fins must be slightly tight as the skin on your heel is rubbing off. What do you do? A) Resolve to buy some larger fins for the next trip and make do until the end of the week with plasters and antiseptic cream. B) Stop diving immediately and claim a full refund from your insurers for loss of enjoyment, sue the dive company for failing to inform you in writing six months in advance that you might need to use your fins on some of the dives, and have the sea whipped by a burly man in his pants. C) Ignore the problem and keep diving until gangrene sets into the foot and spreads up to your throat. Then apply moisturising lotion sparingly to the affected area.
Score one point for every A), a bum infection for every B) and lose a finger for every C). How did you do? Mostly points: You are calm, rational and well-adjusted. You deal with pressure in a reasonable and sensible fashion, carefully providing a measured response to defuse stressful situations. If everyone was as boring and tedious as you there would be no innovation in the world and we'd all still be living in caves made of snow and being eaten by sabre-toothed Tyrannosaurus Rexes. Members of the opposite sex think about you when they want to stave off sexual climax. Four or more bum infections: Your brazen cowardice and refusal to take responsibility even for your own bodily functions is a lesson to us all in stress management and a clear indication of how the future can be a happy, fruitful and hopefully litigious place to live in. More body cavities than fingers: You are someone that refuses to be bowed by the will of others: the kind of person that would launch a thermo-nuclear strike on someone after being shortchanged by a penny due to "the principle of the thing". Sadly you do not have such means at your disposal but fortunately, rusty power tools are never far from reach.
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