As the proverbial janitor with the Rabbit-3 floor machine finished stripping the floor then put the floor finish down with a mop, low and behold he managed to squeeze himself into the corner with freshly laid wax on the floor around him. As the result, he was not able to walk to the door. Not unless he wanted to see his footprints on his beautiful work. Well, he put himself between “the Devil and the Deep blue Sea” or if you want to be less poetic “between the rock and the hard place”
However, the first expression has its root in the wooden ocean ships of the past. Where the longest seam of a wooden ship, which ran from the bow to the stern called the “devil” and this had to be kept watertight. No captain wanted to have the ship sink and join the school of fish below. The “devil” had to be sealed time to time with black tar. This unpleasant job was done by having the seaman suspended from bosun’s chair. This chair is nothing more but a rope and a plank.Sitting on it was very precarious, especially when the ship was on high sea rolling and bouncing up and down like a runaway basketball.
Now back to our sailor and see what else he have done? I can reassure you he didn’t polish the deck with our dual speed machine. Nor did he clean the baseboard. But what else did he do? The sailor to distract himself from this unpleasant job could do nothing more then “Chewing the Fat” a saying used by seafaring men in the 19th century when salted beef was the staple diet aboard ship.
This tough cured beef was good for long voyages when nothing else would keep (remember there was no refrigeration) but needed long chewing time to make it edible. Men often chewed one chunk for hours, hence it was referred to as “chewing the fat.” If our janitor would have done the same thing, the floor would have dried and the janitor no longer would have been between the Devil and the deep blue sea.