Jellyfish and SCUBA diving

[Xist]

Ah, I hope to not offend...

I do not know if that actually happened, but the story has believable details, at least to me. It is a long story, though:

If you think YOU'RE having a bad day at the office, this will put things in perspective! This is even funnier when you realize it's real! Next time you have a bad day at work...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 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."

[user removed]

Ouch!

regards
Mech

[mcrews]

oh dear.....

[NachtRitter]

That story's been around awhile....
1998 Urban Legend: Bad Day at the Office

[NeilBlanchard]

Jellyfish are about the only things that are flourishing in the warmed ocean. There are jellyfish blooms are all too common, and they are quite disruptive to fishermen and even nuclear power plants...

[jamesqf]

I have to wonder about some of the details. The heating, in the first place. I used to dive a bit, and was never cold in a wetsuit, even in places like Monterey Bay, or Lake Tahoe in January. Then it would have to be a pretty small jellyfish to be sucked into the pump (and survive!) and pushed down a narrow garden hose.

Then too, if he was working at any depth (as the number of decompresson stops suggests) wouldn't the water in the uninsulated garden hose cool off?