The jellyfish
Next time you think you have had a bad day at work, think about this
guy…Tom is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers out of
Louisiana and performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below
is an email he sent to his sister. She sent it to Laughline and won the
contest (he wasn’t thrilled with her for that one). Anyway…anytime you
think you have had a bad day at the office, remember this guy.
April 1998
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 shit
sucks the water out of the sea. It heats it to a delightful temp. It then
pumps it down to the diver through a garden hose which is taped to the air
hose. Now this sounds like a damn 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 I take the hose and stuff it down the back of my neck. 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 ass started to itch. So, of course, I
scratched it. This only made things worse. Within a few seconds my ass
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. This is even worse than
the poison ivy you once had under a cast. Now I had that hose down my back.
I don’t have any hair on my back, so the jellyfish couldn’t get stuck to my
back. My ass crack was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I thought was
an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my ass. I informed the
dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were
unclear due to the fact that he along with 5 other divers were laughing
hysterically. Needless to say I aborted the dive. I was instructed to make
3 agonizing in-water decompression stops totaling 35 minutes before I could
come to the surface for my dry chamber decompression. I got to the surface
wearing nothing but my brass helmet. My suit and gear were tied to the bell.
When I got on board the medic, with tears of laughter running down his face,
handed me a tube of cream and told me to shove it “up my ass” when I get in
the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t shit for two days
because my asshole was swollen shut. I later found out that this could
easily have been prevented if the suction hose was placed on the leeward
side of the ship. Anyway, the next time you have a bad day at the office,
think of me. Think about how much worse your day would be if you were to
shove a jellyfish up your ass. I hope you have no bad days at the office.
But if you do, I hope this will make them more tolerable.