Daily Joke: The Worst Job Experience Email That Won a Radio Contest

Rob is a commercial saturation diver for Global Divers down in Louisiana, spending his days performing complex underwater repairs on offshore drilling rigs. It’s a tough gig, but he recently sent an email to his sister that was so hilariously tragic, she immediately forwarded it to radio station 103.2 FM in Fort Wayne, Indiana, for their “Worst Job Experience” contest. Needless to say, she won first prize.

Here is the email that started it all:
“Hi Sis,

Just another note from your bottom-dwelling brother.
I know you’ve been feeling down about work lately, so I thought I’d share my latest office dilemma to help you realize your job isn’t so bad after all. But before I get to the main event, I have to bore you with a few technicalities.

As you know, my ‘office’ lies at the bottom of the Gulf. I wear a wet suit, and this time of year, the water is brutally cold. To keep from turning into a human popsicle, we use a diesel-powered industrial water heater.

This $20,000 piece of equipment sucks seawater in, heats it to a delightful temperature, and pumps it down to the diver through a heavy-duty garden hose taped to our air line.

It sounds like a brilliant plan, and I’ve used it dozens of times with zero complaints. When I get to the bottom and start working, I take the end of the hose and stuff it down the back of my wet suit. This floods the entire suit with warm water. It’s basically like working in a personal, underwater Jacuzzi.

Everything was going perfectly until, all of a sudden, my butt started to itch. Naturally, I reached back and scratched it. That only made things infinitely worse. Within seconds, the itch turned into a fiery, agonizing burn. I yanked the hose out from my back, but the damage was already done.
In sheer panic, I realized exactly what had happened. The hot water intake had sucked up a jellyfish and pumped it directly into my suit. Now, since I don’t have much hair on my lower back, the jellyfish couldn’t stick there. However, the crack of my butt was not nearly as fortunate.

When I scratched what I thought was a simple itch, I was actually grinding a live, stinging jellyfish directly into the crack of my butt.

I immediately radioed the dive supervisor to explain my agonizing dilemma. His instructions were entirely unclear, mostly because he, along with five other divers on the comms channel, were laughing so hysterically they could barely breathe.

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 even reach the surface to begin my chamber dry decompression.

Thirty-five minutes of burning.

When I finally arrived at the surface, I was wearing nothing but my heavy brass diving helmet. As I clumsily climbed out of the water, the site medic—whose face was red and streaming with tears of laughter—handed me a massive tube of soothing cream. He told me to rub it on my butt the second I got inside the decompression chamber.

The cream eventually put the fire out, but I couldn’t poop for two days because my butt was swollen completely shut.

So, next time you’re having a bad day at the office, just think about how much worse it would be if you had a jellyfish shoved up your butt.”