A Jellyfish Bad Day

Next time you have a bad day, 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, 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 wet suit. 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 wet suit. 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 rear end started to itch. So, of course, I scratched it. This only made things worse.

Within a few seconds, it 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. When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into myself.

I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear because he and 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, totalling thirty-five minutes, before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression.

When I arrived at the surface and 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 onto the affected area as soon as I got into the chamber. The cream put the fire out, but it took two days before I could sit down again.

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 down your pants. Now repeat to yourself, "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job."

Now, whenever you have a bad day, ask yourself: Is this a jellyfish bad day? May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!