Next time you have a bad day at work, think of this guy. 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 FM 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 wetsuit. 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 pretty 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.”