A day in the life of a diver

[ScubaDon]

I really feel for this guy:

LOVE YOUR JOB

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 ".

 

[DandyDon]

Yeah, it's funny - every time I read it, but in the wrong forum, perhaps...?

 

[Dee]

Hilarious...every time I read it. It's an urban legend that's been around for several years.

 

[Rick Murchison]

You mean it isn't true??? Surely you jest! Next thing you'll be tellin' me the guy who got dropped on the forest fire in full scuba gear isn't true, either!
Rick

 

[Bob3]

A delightful story.
Whoever wrote it was either a commercial diver or very much involved in the industry. It's not a very widely known fact about using a wetsuit ($120) in place of a hot water suit ($1200).

 

[H2Andy]

bob, i noticed he writes:

"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."

would this be SOP? also, shouldn't he be doing dry deco not at the surface but
down below in an underwater chamber?

otherwise, if he got to the surface after 35 minutes deco, isn't he done?

 

[BlueDevil]

Next thing you'll be tellin' me the guy who got dropped on the forest fire in full scuba gear isn't true, either!
Rick

Course it's true. I know someone whose boss's cousin's nephew's best friend was there and saw it!

 

[Bob3]

bob, i noticed he writes:
"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."

would this be SOP? also, shouldn't he be doing dry deco not at the surface but down below in an underwater chamber?

otherwise, if he got to the surface after 35 minutes deco, isn't he done?

There again, the author reveals a knowlege of standard commercial procedures. For "shallower" dives, it's standard practice to blow off the last stop in the topside chamber. Having only 35 min of in water deco would indicate a pretty shallow depth.

At any rate, I have to run off for our monthly weekly meeting of the "Bay Area Bambi Bucket Divers". Our firediving sessions have been really lousy of late due to all the wet weather.

 

[GDI]

Maybe we should make a thread called urban diver stories

 

[pipedope]

And wet suits used in their place.

How many know about cold water suits?

In FL it is not that uncommon that the water is too warm and a working diver will overheat. Trust me on this one. Heat exhaustion or heat stroke is no joke, especially when you are still in a wet suit.

The simple solution is a garden hose stuck in the wet suit with cool water pumped down.
In contaminated water you may need full protection of a dry suit and then you put another suit on top of that, in the outer suit you pump cold water. Needless to say, this gets expensive, complicated and annoying.