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Pastimes : Don't Ask Rambi -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Don Pueblo who wrote (19914)	3/21/1999 6:11:00 AM
From: Ish	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 71178

You lucky devil. I always wanted to try scuba diving but there are no places to dive where I live. I have snorkled in Florida and Cabo when I was younger and enjoyed that.

To: Don Pueblo who wrote (19914)	3/21/1999 8:20:00 AM
From: Jack Colton	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 71178

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.