Just as a word of explanation, Brian is a commercial saturation diver for
Globalers out of Louisiana and performs underwater repairs on offshore
drilling rigs. Below is an email he sent to his sister. Anytime you think
you have had a bad day at the office, remember this letter ... True story.
April 1998
Just another note from your bottom dwelling brother. Last week I had a
bad day at the office. 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
garbage 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 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 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 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. 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 butt crack was not as fortunate. When I scratched what I
thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into my butt..
I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the comm. 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 chamber dry 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 butt when I get in the chamber. The cream put the fire out,
but I couldn't take a crap for two days because my butthole 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 butt. I
hope you have no bad days at the office. But if you do, I hope this will
make them more tolerable.
But if you think that one was bad, check THIS one out!
SOMETHING TO THINK ABOUT THE NEXT TIME YOU THINK THAT YOU'RE HAVING A BAD DAY
(this was an article in the CALIFORNIA EXAMINER, March 20, 1998):
Fire Authorities in California found a corpse in a burnt out section of
forest while assessing the damage done by a forest fire. The deceased male
was dressed in a full wet suit, complete with a dive tank, flippers, and face
mask. A post-mortem examination revealed that the person died not from burns
but from massive internal injuries. Dental records provided a positive
identification. Investigators then set about determining how a fully clad
diver ended up in the middle of a forest fire. It was revealed that, on the
day of the fire, the person went for a diving trip off the coast -- some 20
miles away from the forest.
The firefighters, seeking to control the fire as quickly as possible,
called in a fleet of helicopters with very large buckets. The buckets were
dropped into the ocean for rapid filling, then flown to the forest fire and
emptied.
You guessed it. One minute our diver was making like Flipper in the
Pacific, the next he was doing a breaststroke in a fire bucket 300 feet in the
air. Apparently, he extinguished exactly 5'10" of the fire. Some days it just
doesn't pay to get out of bed.
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