Pull this out when you think you’re having a bad day at work. It’s a letter from a deep sea diver to his sister that apparently got airplay on the radio in Louisianna:
“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 cold. 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 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 to 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 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. Now, since I don’t have any hair on my back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick to it. However, the crack of my butt was not as fortunate.
When I scratched what I thought was an itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish into the crack of my butt. I informed the dive supervisor of my dilemma over the communicator. His instructions were unclear due to the fact that he, a long with 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 totaling thirty-five minutes before I could reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression.
When I arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my brass helmet.
As I 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 on my butt as soon as I got in the chamber.
The cream put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen shut. So, the next time you’re having a bad day at work, think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.
Now repeat after me, “I love my job, I love my job, I love my job.” And, whenever you’re having a bad day, ask yourself, is this a jellyfish bad day? May you NEVER have a jellyfish bad day!!!!!”
Waiting for some sort of rebuttal from PETA…
Here’s to the colorectal surgeon
Misunderstood and much maligned
Slaving in the heart of darkness
Working where the sun don’t shine
http://teamhouse.tni.net/humor/colorectal/surgeon.htm
Crap. Bad link.
For the fun of it, try the whole humor page, and then go to the root for some old school American heroes, Snake-eater style.
Mmm, that link, the one what says “Bad Link,” is actually the good link. Really. Trust me on this one.
Okay, I’m heading for my rack now.
Hmmmm, methinks I’ve heard this one before.
Ah yes: http://www.snopes.com/humor/letters/diver.asp
It’s listed as “undetermined” but their info afterwards definitely tends towards the doubtful, as a deep diver wouldn’t wear a wetsuit, he’d wear a drysuit.
Shipmates,
Please note, as a certified Nitrox diver, I note the protagonist in agony was working:
1. at depth (i.e. needing a decompression chamber)
2. in cold water (necessitating a thick wet suit)
3. with jellyfish
Which of the above conditions prohibits the average recreational diver from getting wet?
Navy divers now have fancy pants fiberglass space age helmets. They can dive with wet or dry suits. The do have water for heat and cooling, too.
In the days of old, or “back in the day,” we wore spun copper helmets of 45 lbs (includes breast plate weight), a suit of 18 lbs, shoes of 17.5 lbs each, and a weight belt of 98 lbs. Note: There was no hot water coming to that suit. You wore layers of long johns and/or sweat suits. If there was a leak in the suit while working on a project at 30 ft in the Anacostia River in January, then you had “cooling” provided. Heat? After the end of the work day, all the gear washed down and stowed, and the obligatorily 100 flutter kicks, when you got in your car for the drive home as the sun set.
Scratch your butt? Hell, you couldn’t even scratch your nose if it itched. It took two tenders to dress and then undress you. Think the Pillsbury doughboy meets Sea Hunt.
If he did have a rig such that he could be in a wet suit while air and hot water were coming from the surface, then it was a Jack Browne or later, the Kirby Morgan “band mask” rigs. Neither of those are made of brass (note: even the MK 5 wasn’t brass, either).
A divers “day at the office” for a salvage diver certainly has lots of hardships. Plenty enough, too, for some similar funny story. Like the day Cole left his tuna sandwich in the steam heated locker room all morning, then had a dive after lunch…now, that’s funny, if you were close to the speaker from “red diver.” Not so much if your name was Cole.
With regard to SSG Jeff’s comment – “as a deep diver wouldn’t wear a wetsuit, he’d wear a drysuit.”
As a certified hard hat diver who worked in the Gulf of Mexico for four years SSG Jeff is incorrect. When diving in the winter months in the Gulf the divers could use a dry suit (if they owned one – most do not) but when using a hot water machine they would only wear a wet suit. The dry suit is not compatible with the hot water machine (not enough flow – you would blow up like a hot water balloon and not be able to work).
Not sure of any pumps out there that’d suck up a jelly, then spit it out again without cuisinarting the mass into bits of harmless goo…
Then again, does jelly fish goo still have the ability to sting? I’ve never chopped one to bits and tried.
I first saw this story back in the mid 1990s and its still funny. True or not (and I don’t think it is), its still a great story for breaking up a normal day and to remind us, our jobs may not be perfect, but others have worst jobs.
Have to agree with Andrew, I don’t think the story is true. Funny as h*ll but unlikely. While I think a pulverized jellyfish’s venom would still be active, I don’t recall ever seeing jellyfish in water deep enough for compression dives in the winter (probably wrong on that count – there normally isn’t a lot of work in the winter so I didn’t spend a lot of time offshore from Oct – March).
I have to say its hilarious, albeit dubious at best. I’m not a hard hat guy, but I do run trimix through my regs on a pretty regular basis. If he was breathing surface-supplied air (as is stated), he would need to have spent greater than 30 minutes at 130 ft to need all that deco time AND a chamber ride. Also, a jellyfish through a garden hose? They’re not THAT supple. True, the jelly could have been pulverized by the pump, but why would it have then only attacked his buttocks? I don’t buy it.
When you check Snopes.com on this ones validity, it says “undetermined,” but they lean towards probably not.
Still makes me pucker in all the wrong places reading it though.
While the jellyfish’ body would be pureed, it’s the tendrils that have the stingers. The stingers themselves are actually cells, so even if the pump tore the tendrils apart, whatever got dumped in the suit would make the dive unpleasant.