Pool Boy Promoted To Ocean Boy
(WILDWOOD, New Jersey) Area pool boy Thomas Smith, 41, has been promoted to ocean boy and is now responsible for the cleaning and maintenance of approximately 139 million square miles of water. Smith had previously overseen water safety and quality for Morada Del Sol, a hotel in Wildwood, New Jersey.
Smith says he’s ready. “I feel prepared. Whether it’s fishing out a bracelet from the pool or breathing life directly into the blowhole of a great white shark eight hundred miles off the coast of Madagascar, I’m ready. It’s all just water to me.” He laughs. “Sharks have blow holes, right?”
Competition for the position was fierce. Roughly eighty thousand pool attendants from across the world applied. One of them was Charles “Skip” Reeder, 102. Reeder is no stranger to the job— he’d served briefly as “Acting” Ocean Boy in the 1940s when his predecessor was shot in the face by a torpedo.
“I couldn’t serve in the military,” he says. “I had webbed feet.” Reeder grins and the fact lingers in the air for a moment.
“I guess I had other work I was meant to do.”
As Ocean Boy, Reeder says, he spent roughly five years swimming the world’s oceans alone, picking up debris, “coddling coral” and nursing aquatic mammals back to health. (The job’s responsibilities have since narrowed, and the newly hired Smith will mainly focus on plastic waste, sources say).
What made Reeder apply for the position now, decades after he’d last seen the ocean?
“My grandson thought it’d be funny, I guess. Figured I’d just dive right in.”
