Hit my 1,000th underwater weld inspection last Thursday and still can't believe I've spent that many hours staring at steel 40 feet down

I was counting up my logbooks over coffee and realized number 1,000 was coming up, so I marked it by finding a bolt stuck to a pipe that looked like a happy face, which felt about right for this job... has anyone else hit a weird milestone underwater that caught them off guard?

3 comments

3 Comments

abby30829d ago

A thousand dives and you're trying to pass that off as a milestone? Come on. That's just a round number that sounds good on a T-shirt. Underwater welding is brutal on your body and your gear, and the risk of getting bent or electrocuted never goes down just because you've done it a bunch. If you're not logging the near misses and the times you had to abort, you're just fooling yourself into thinking experience equals safety. I've seen guys with half your dives do cleaner work because they weren't half asleep from sheer repetition.

noah_webb29d agoMost Upvoted

MAN, you are SO missing the point. Nobody's saying a thousand dives makes you invincible, but you're acting like the guy's bragging when he's probably just EXHAUSTED. That kind of track record means he's seen the stuff you're talking about, the near misses and the aborted dives, and he's STILL here. You're so focused on the number itself that you're ignoring the real milestone: surviving long enough to get that number in a line of work that kills people before they hit a hundred.

abby18923d ago

@abby308 I see this same thing happening in a lot of places outside of diving too, honestly. People get caught up chasing big round numbers and forget that the real test is how you handle the small stuff that goes wrong along the way. Youre right that just surviving a thousand dives doesnt mean much if youre not paying attention to the details and the close calls. Ive noticed in my own line of work that the folks who brag about how many years theyve been at something are often the ones who get sloppy. Its like weve all gotten so used to counting things that we stopped asking what the count actually means.