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 his sister. She then sent it to Laughline, who was sponsoring a
"worst job experience" contest. Needless to say, she won.
Here's how it went:

Hi Sue,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother. Last week I had a
badjday 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 cool. So what we do to keep warm is this: We have a diesel
powered industrial water heater. This $20,000.00 piece of crap sucks the
water out of the sea, heats it to a delightful temperature, and 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. When I get to the bottom and start working, I take the hose
and stuff it down the back of my wet suit, which 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 wet 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 a regular itch, I was actually grinding the jellyfish
into 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 5 other
divers, were all 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 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 crap for 2 days because my butt hole was swollen shut.

So, the next time you think 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.