Did You Know Back Pain Meme
North ine years ago, I did a reverse paradigm search on a photo of me and was shocked to notice it had go a meme. People online thought my smile, combined with the await in my optics, seemed terribly distressing. They were calling me "Hide the Pain Harold".
The photo came from a shoot I'd done a year earlier, when I was however working as an electrical engineer. A professional photographer had got in touch subsequently seeing my holiday photographs on Facebook. He said he was seeking someone like me to exist in some stock images. Everyone is a piddling vain within, myself included, and so I was happy that he wanted me. He invited me to a photoshoot near my dwelling in Budapest and we took shots in unlike locations and settings. Over the course of two years he took hundreds of pictures of me for photograph libraries.
I thought the pictures would merely be used by businesses and websites, but I wasn't expecting the memes. People overlaid text on my pictures, talking about their wives leaving them, or proverb their identity had been stolen and their bank business relationship emptied. They used my image because information technology looked as if I was smiling through the pain.
One time the memes were out in the earth, journalists began to contact me, and wanted to come to my home to interview me. My wife hated it: she thought it interfered in our individual life and didn't like the way I was portrayed. People thought I wasn't a existent person, that I was a Photoshop creation – someone fifty-fifty got in contact asking for proof that I existed.
I knew that it was impossible to end people making memes, but information technology still annoyed me that Facebook pages, some with hundreds of thousands of followers, were using my photograph as their profile picture show, and pretending to be me. Some kind of make had been made out of me and I would take been a fool not to brand use of it. So, in 2017, I created my own Facebook fan page and updated it with videos and stories from my travels.
That started everything going. People noticed that I had taken ownership of the meme and got in contact to offer me work. I was given a part in a television commercial for a Hungarian auto dealer. In ane of the adverts, I travelled to Germany to buy a used car and information technology broke downward halfway home; if I had bought the same machine through their visitor, the brand claimed, it wouldn't have happened. The fee for that commercial changed my wife'southward mind well-nigh the meme.
Now my life has changed dramatically. People ask me to talk about my story, to demonstrate the power of memes. A football website flew me to England to make a video about Manchester City; I got to tour the ground and watch them play a Champions League game. The German language postal service-order giant Otto flew me out to brand commercials for them. The Hungarian hard stone band Deject nine+ have a song called Hide The Pain, with me in the video. I'm the face of Totum, the British discount menu run by the National Union of Students – they got me to vesture a bucket hat. I've even given a TED talk.
Terminal year, I took 20 flights from Budapest to destinations all over the world: Europe, Russia and, increasingly, Due south America. Last month, I travelled to Chile and Colombia for some Television receiver appearances; that was the first fourth dimension I felt like a real celebrity. Every fourth dimension I walked downward the street a oversupply would gather, so they gave me bodyguards. I've never enjoyed a fame like that earlier; sometimes information technology was frightening.
We're besides using the meme for good. Nosotros desire information technology to exist more than just a sad smile. I am the face up of a entrada for a mental health service in Hungary, similar to the Samaritans in the UK. I'm proud that something more than has come up out of the last x years than just an idiotic smile.
I'k 74 at present. I spent 40 years every bit an engineer. I did a bit of public speaking and so, at conferences and lectures, but that was very different from appearing on television set talkshows and YouTube videos. As an engineer, information technology was really me. Now, it's role play: I'chiliad Hibernate the Pain Harold. But I'k non really a sad guy – I think I'k rather a happy one.
As told to Chris Stokel-Walker
Do you have an experience to share? Email feel@theguardian.com
Source: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/nov/08/experience-hide-the-pain-harold-face-became-meme-turned-it-into-career
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