Brian's Bad Day
Gives the words "bad day" a whole new perspective...
Brian 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 a contest (he wasn't thrilled with her for that one).
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
junk 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 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 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 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 things more tolerable.
Take care, and I hope to hear from you soon.
Brian
