Bad day at the office

Below is an E-mail he sent to his sister. She then sent it to radio station 103.2 on FM dial in Ft. Wayne, Indiana, who 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 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 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 take the hose and stuff it down the back of my wetsuit. 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, along 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, 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 to yourself, "I love my job, I love my job, I love my job." Terry & Skipper, Clearlake Texas

...... you are losing it Brody, make sure lil thoms not in the room when you blow what you have left of brains out. Sheeeeze you"re pathetic.

Capt. Suzy 35s5 NY

Stand-up jetski. Mid-August afternoon (hot, in and out of the water) in 1998. Shallow bay west of Delaware town of Dewey Beach.

I started to throttle up the jetski to give me enough momentum to pull myself up onto it. To my horror I saw a cloud of small jellysfish in the water just ahead of me. Here I am, dragging behind the jetski...

The impeller sucks up the jellyfish, chops 'em up and ejects them out the nozzle... straight down my shorts, since I'm hangin' off the back trying to build momentum.

Felt like someone tossed a running industrial belt sander into my pants, or what I'd imagine that'd feel like...

I hung off the side, opened the throttle WIDE OPEN and headed straight out for deeper water. Hung off the side with barely my nose above water in an attempt to chill the UNBELIEAVABLE stinging. Took about a half-hour until my buddies came out wondering what the heck I was doing. Heard the same laughter.

Suffice to say I ain't going near a stand-up jetski again anytime soon.

-Bill Kearney