Man goes scuba diving for the first time, but his ‘I’m good’ signals have the instructors worried

A first scuba dive usually comes with a crash course in hand signals before anyone gets in the water, and DJ Dom Dolla‘s video suggests that lesson didn’t quite land. Posted to TikTok, the clip recounts a dive that turned into a running back-and-forth between him and two instructors, with each trip back up followed by another check-in.

According to Dolla, he first gave the thumbs-up underwater, apparently thinking it meant everything was fine. When they came back up, the instructors checked on him. “Are you okay?” he recalls them asking, to which he replied, “Yeah, I’m f***g good.” They then descended again, and he gave the same signal underwater. When they came back up, the instructors asked again, “You’re alright?” “Yeah, man, I’m having a great time, like, okay, sick,” he says he responded.

The confusion comes down to one small but important detail: underwater, a thumbs-up does not mean “OK.” According to PADI, divers use the thumbs-up to signal that they want to ascend, while the OK sign is made by touching the thumb and index finger together. So Dolla was giving his instructors the wrong signal while telling them he was fine.

Then things got confusing

The same exchange continued through another descent and climb, then a third, until, in Dolla’s telling, the instructors had had enough. “What’s the fucking problem?” he remembers them asking. “I was just telling you I’m all good.”

By the end of the video, the “lost in translation” title makes a little more sense, with Dolla saying, “So now I could just go…” while demonstrating the proper OK hand signal. The mix-up is funny in hindsight, but being on the same page with an instructor matters when you’re underwater. The same can be said for other adventure activities, as one woman found when she ignored her instructor’s directions before jumping from a ledge.

The comments section largely sided with the instructors. One reply argued they “should teach you at the beginning in case there’s problems,” while another put the blame more directly on “not teaching you the hand signals.” Another commenter zeroed in on the specific signal at issue, asking why the gesture used isn’t “instead of” the thumbs-up, referencing the actual OK sign divers are trained to use underwater.

A few had their own version of the mix-up, including one commenter who wrote, “My friend was showing 👍 to the instructor cuz she actually had to go up, but we were taking pictures and he thought she was posing.”

Dolla weighed in further down in the comments, seemingly unbothered by how things could have gone. “coulda died but it do be like that sometimes,” he wrote, a line that’s picked up over 4,000 likes on its own. It’s the kind of near-miss that shows up across travel content generally, not just diving, in the same way a cruise going off script can turn a whole trip sideways over one missed detail. For now, Dolla’s workaround is just to keep it simple next time he’s underwater.