He performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. Below is a
e-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 FM
in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, which 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 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." "And whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself: is this a
"jellyfish bad" day?"
