I for one, will never forget the name Stockton Rush, or his irresponsible company and idea OceanGate, and OceanGate Expeditions. The amount of money that was sunk into very little research, planning, and safety protocols nearly makes my own mind implode. Just because they’re eliminating evidence that the company ever existed on the internet does not mean we should stop talking about all the other INFINITE possibilities that this money could have went towards….

For instance, a paper-mâché skyscraper to conduct important business in, a motorcycle made entirely of tin foil so the driver and can lift it up and down with ease, or maybe even a pedestrian bridge composed of just a thin layer of canvas so the people can paint on it if they so please. So many good, solid ideas out there… wasted.

What would you do with a million dollars?

🎹: Make a cat cafe business with Hero as my lovely husband who visits daily to drink coffee!

🔪: Find a way to pet tigers without dying.

⭐️: Save up on the money and when I have enough, fund treatment for my mom’s alcoholism and to support me and my dads house. :|

🪴: Get therapy for my weed addiction, and buy a new camera.

🏀: Move out of that fucked up house with my baby sis and Sunny.

📖: Support Sally and her future, as I am worried they’ll neglect her as they did Kel.

🦖: Find a way to revive dinosaurs or other prehistoric animals. Either that or find a way to destroy Jack Horner’s wealth! >:(

🖌️: Buy art supplies and not starve as an artist.

🦈: Make an actually USABLE submarine!

This whole submarine thing is a perfect spotlight on how the super wealthy take on an "I'm bulletproof" mentality, which makes sense considering how money can insulate you from pretty much anything.

Then when some guy offers to take them to see the Titanic for $250 000 and makes them sign a waiver that screams THIS TITANIUM AND CARBON SAUSAGE THAT YOU WILL BE BOLTED INTO FROM THE OUTSIDE IS CONTROLLED WITH A BOOTLEG PS3 GAMEPAD AND HAS NOT BEEN PROVEN SAFE BY ANYONE WHO KNOWS THEIR SHIT. THERE IS A VERY REAL POSSIBILITY YOU COULD DIE A HORRIBLE DEATH they go "not me, I'm rich 😗✌" and climb right on.

I've seen this in recreational diving circles too. The richer the clients, the worse they are at listening to you when you end the dive to prevent people running out of air and/or getting the bends. Sure there are the ones who get really into tek, see/hear about someone dying and go "oh shit maybe these limits exist for a reason" and actually start listening but I have pulled out my hair over rich assholes ignoring safety instructions enough to know oceangate had it coming. When social consequences have never existed for someone, they tend to forget that the sea doesn't give a shit who their dad is.

so as a former employee of RMS Titanic Inc, I have some thoughts I need to get out about this whole current situation, or I will literally explode.

for context, I worked for RMST Inc. for a year and a half as a tour guide and artifact specialist. The company owns the salvage rights to the wreck site, and partners with Oceangate and other companies to retrieve artifacts. the artifacts are used for educational purposes only, in the museum that I worked at, although they weren’t above selling little bits of coal from the Titanic in stupid little tchotchkes like snowglobes and hourglasses.

i dedicated so much of my life and passion to that company and that museum and was treated like absolute dirt lol. and I didn’t even get the worst of it, I had friends and coworkers whose safety and wellbeing was consistently disregarded for the sake of profit, fighting desperately for corporate to stop pretending to care about the legacy of Titanic when all they really cared about was making money

so despite my initial shock at reading about what was going on with the missing submersible, I can’t say I’m surprised. This is what fucking happens when you cut corners and put profit over everything else. If only there was some big historical event that we could look to that would show us just exactly how dangerous that can be...  oh wait.

Jack Thayer, who was 17 when he survived Titanic, said that “the world woke up on April 15, 1912″, which pretty much sums up how SURE people were in 1912 that they would never make those same mistakes again. They realized had gotten complacent and swore things would be different. They enacted safety laws, pointed fingers at survivors, created conspiracy theories to try to explain what happened, all out of fear of it happening again. And yet, history always repeats itself

and now people are fucking OBSESSED with the Titanic, they find it fascinating,  they won’t fucking leave it alone, and the company I worked for, and Oceangate, and others, capitalize on that because they’re greedy and want to make money off of it. all they care about is how to profit off of it. they PRETEND to care about Titanic but they don’t. They never did.

I also actually have a personal connection to one of the five members of the team in the submersible. I met P.H. Nargeolet at the event our museum did commemorating the 110th anniversary of the sinking, I spoke to him and heard firsthand some of his accounts of dives to the wreck site, I even took a picture with him. He cared, he cared so much about Titanic and its legacy, and so do I and so did so many of my friends I worked with. The company we worked for took advantage of our caring, it took advantage of how passionate we were about it in order to line its executives’ fucking pocket

I’m horrified, I’m devastated, I’m vindicated.

on the one hand, I hope this ruins them. i want to watch the company die. there��s a satisfaction in that. but the shitty thing is how much suffering has to happen for things to change. i just wish good people didn’t have to die to make change happen. I wish people cared first, before tragedy strikes. I wish our world wasn’t so fucked up and shit like this didn’t happen. But it did. And it does. And money won’t save any of those people any more than it saved John Jacob Astor or Benjamin Guggenheim, or any of the other rich greedy assholes who died on Titanic. I’m not celebrating their deaths. But I won’t ever forget who suffers the most. The coal trimmers and the stewards and the minimum wage guest service associates at the museum I worked at.

I’m glad I don’t work there anymore. But some of my best friends still do. And I don’t want them to suffer more because of this. All I can hope is that it enacts meaningful change that actually lasts. But I know that’s just wishful thinking.