The tartar sauce-hued hero who served as sentry to his neighborhood watering hole has lost his job after he sicced the police on a black woman who was trying to sneak into the pool area he patrolled like a fugitive slave catcher.
On Friday, Sonoco Products Company announced that Adam Bloom was no longer employed at the Fortune 500 company after the grown-ass safety patrol officer called the Winston-Salem Police Department on a black woman when he foiled her ingenious criminal plan to swim in the pool of her own gated neighborhood.
The half dad-half toddler-bodied bouncer became the subject of nationwide scorn after Facebook user Jasmine Edwards posted a now-viral video of the incident on her Facebook with the caption: “This is a classic case of racial profiling in my half a million $$ neighborhood pool. This happened to me and my baby today. What a shame!!”
Following a loud public outcry, the public learned that, instead of working in his dream job as a Secret Service Agent for chlorinated watering holes, Bloom was actually employed by Sonoco as a “value realization leader.” However, the paper products and packaging company realized that Bloom had no real value, aside from leading the police in the direction of black people who he thought might be out of place.
“We are aware of a terrible incident involving the actions of one our employees outside of the workplace,” the statement from Sonoco read. “The well-documented incident, which involves activities at a neighborhood pool over the 4th of July, does not reflect the core values of our Company, and the employee involved is no longer employed by the Company in any respect.”
For the sake of transparency, I must say that when Sonoco says they have fostered a “culture of diversity, inclusion and unity” for over 119 years, it is one of the few times I believe a multinational corporation. Both my grandmother and grandfather retired from the company that hired them to work alongside white employees when segregation was still legal in South Carolina, where the company is headquartered.
But apparently Pool Patrol Paul didn’t get the company memo, and now is searching for a job. Hopefully, he can find employment in the lucrative sector of cop-calling. Maybe he should put in an application at Starbucks or send his resume to Donald Trump. Perhaps there’s an opening at the Mar-a-Lago pool for a value realization leader who doubles as a hall monitor on weekends.
But my favorite part of this story is that this all happened on Wednesday, July 4. Aside from employing my grandparents, I worked in the factories there during summers while I was in college. One of the best things about the job was that Sonoco would shut down all of their operations on Independence Day and give employees the entire week off. I sincerely hope they still do this, because we all know what that would mean:
Paul Blart, Pool Cop was fired on his day off.