Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers in Louisiana.
He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is an
E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2
on the FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who was sponsoring a worst job
Experience contest. Needless to say, she won.
Hi Sue, just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last
Week I had a bad day at the office. I know you've been feeling down lately
at work, so I thought I would share my dilemma with you to make you
realize it's not so bad after all.
Before I can tell you what happened to me, I first must bore you with
A few technicalities of my job. As you know, my office lies at the
Bottom of the sea. I wear a suit to the office. It's a wet suit. This time
of year the water is quite cool. So what we do to keep warm is this:
We have a diesel powered industrial water heater. This $20,000 piece of
equipment sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful
temperature. It then pumps it down to the diver through a garden
hose, which is taped to the air hose. Now this sounds like a darn good
plan, and I've used it several times with no complaints. What I do, when I
get to the bottom and start working, is take the hose and stuff it
down the back of my wetsuit. This floods my whole suit with warm water.
It's like working in a Jacuzzi. Everything was going well until all
of a sudden, my butt started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it.
This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my butt started to burn.
I pulled the hose out from my back, but the damage was done.
In agony I realized what had happened. The hot water machine had
sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it into my suit. Now, since I don't
have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn't stick to it.
However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I
thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the
crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over
the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he,
along with five other divers were all laughing hysterically.
Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make three
agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling thirty-five minutes
before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry
decompression.
When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass
helmet. As I climbed out of the water, the medic, with tears of
laughter running down his face, handed me a tube of cream and told me
to rub it on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber. The cream put the
fire out, but I couldn't poop for two days because my butt was swollen
shut.
So, next time you're having a bad day at work, think about how much
worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.
Now repeat to yourself, "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job."
Now whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad
day?
May you NEVER have a jelly fish bad day!
