The Jellyfish Story

Tom is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers out of Louisiana and performs underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs.  Below is an e-mail he sent to his sister.  She sent it to Laugh line and won the contest (he wasn't thrilled with her for that one).  Anyway...anytime you think you have had a bad day at the office, remember this guy.

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 shit 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 damn 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 dry chamber 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 them more tolerable. Take care, and I hope to hear from you soon.

Love you, Tom