Divers do it underwater

The other night, I went to the Hard Rock Cafe, where this div­ing mag­a­zine was hav­ing some event. This event was so exclu­sive you could only get an invite if you had inter­net access at home, went online, entered your phone num­ber, and received an SMS with an autho­ri­sa­tion code which you then had to show to the magazine’s peo­ple at the door, so they could give you a piece of paper that enti­tled you to one free drink. Or, you had to be a bona fide card-carrying diver. And if you were, the magazine’s peo­ple at the door would make you com­plete a four page long sur­vey form before they gave you that piece of free drink paper.

So before I went to the HRC, I went online, entered my phone num­ber and waited with bated breath for my free drink autho­ri­sa­tion code SMS, and as you can imag­ine, I was beside myself when I received it.

Like every­one else, I have some diver friends, so I wasn’t with­out famil­iar com­pany. I waited for my diver friends for an hour, and then for another half hour while they shared a pen to com­plete their four page sur­vey form. Then for another two while they swapped div­ing loca­tion sto­ries. Then I got a word in side­ways and I sez to them, ‘can we order some food now?’. Good thing my diver friends were hun­gry too.

Dur­ing and after food, me and my diver friends min­gled with other divers, and I was asked more than once where my last dive trip was, and I answered the same num­ber of times that I didn’t dive, never dove, never could dive, because I pre­ferred being on the sur­face.

You don’t know what you’re miss­ing, they all tell me. I tell them I know, and I will join the Cult of the Under­wa­ter Breath­ing Appa­ra­tus Users as soon as I’m good and ready with some spare cash. Like every other cult and their mem­bers, they are thrilled to hear this, but their excite­ment sud­denly wears off when I tell them I think this event is the only way engi­neers and IT CON­sul­tants can get dis­counted drinks at nightspots (show your diver card and get 20% off, woohoo) because I didn’t think there was a sin­gle nightspot that had an Engi­neers Night or IT Con­sul­tants Night. Hey, joke only lah, I also not Law or Media or Finance whaaat.

There was another bunch of diver types dis­cussing what make and model of cam­era was suited for under­wa­ter use. Some­thing about allow­ing closer focus dis­tance or some­thing, then they showed me some snap­shots they took of them­selves under­wa­ter in Man­ado, Sipadan and other such like under­wa­ter div­ing places. I told them they could jug­gle posi­tions in all the group pho­tos and I wouldn’t have been able to tell the dif­fer­ence. I’m the one with the green mask, one of them said.

I wasn’t mak­ing many new friends, so I saun­tered across the floor to this table with sev­eral com­put­ers show­ing video clips of under­wa­ter fauna and flora. There were two girls there, and one of them chat­ted with me for a bit, telling me about under­wa­ter fauna and flora and where they could be found in and around Sin­ga­pore (erm, under­wa­ter?). Next thing I know, I bought a brochure for $2.50 called ‘Guidesheet to the amaz­ing marine life of the south­ern shores of Sin­ga­pore’. Pretty wordy title, but chock full of pic­tures and inter­est­ing bits of infor­ma­tion, like the leg­ends of Pulau Hantu, Sis­ters, St John’s and Kusu Islands, as well as bits about how you can still go see coral reefs and reef flats with­out as much as touch­ing scuba gear, and in Sin­ga­pore too.

Must go already lah. Who’s game?

Much rather buy beer here.