So you've seen this meme, eh? It's a photo of a guy at a party, surrounded by women, but his focus is on a hockey game. Aptly captioned "CANADIAN PARTIES."
Over the years, it's been uploaded and reuploaded and pinned, and tweeted, and aggregated. So much that the image slightly alters, and grows grainier, every time it's shared.
BuzzFeed Canada has tracked down the guy at the literal centre of the meme — more than 7 years after the photo started circulating.
Meet Harley Davis (with his now fiancée Annie!):
And here's what you need to know about him, and how he became an unidentified Canadian celebrity of the internet:
* Harley Davis is now a 35-year-old Sales Manager in Wakefield, Quebec. He's originally from Ottawa (hence the Senators game that was on at the time of the photo).
* The original photo was taken sometime in 2008 or 2009, when he was in his late twenties.
* At the time, he was working a part-time job at a restaurant, where there were proportionally way more women staffed than men. The waitresses (who are the ladies in the photo) invited him over to a party after work one day, and when he showed up, he was the only guy there. "Some other guys came over after," he told us.
* But before they arrived, the waitresses and him all took a photo with a camera set on self-timer, and as the flash went off, Harley peeped over at the screen to check the score of the hockey game. "I thought I'd catch the game before the timer went off, I thought I had more time," he chuckled.
* He put the original photo on Reddit with the caption "when you show to a party and you're the only guy." At the time he said he still had "nooo idea that [he] was looking at the hockey game."
* The very next day, someone found his photo and captioned it "Canadian Parties." It went up to the top of Reddit and stayed there.
* George Takei shared the meme.
* Suddenly, people who knew him or recognized his face started messaging him. Over the years, it has randomly popped up on his Facebook feed, or when he was just browsing the internet.
* Harley has tried to identify himself on different Imgur/Reddit/comment threads over the years, but no one believes him. "People would say 'yeah right, buddy,' 'cause I'm with a bunch of girls." (LOL.)
* This is the first time he's been publicly identified and he's humbly laughing at the entire experience: "The weirdest thing is trying to get credit and nobody believes you!"
* Like other famous meme subjects, he's called himself "an anonymous famous person:"
"I go through my daily life, work my normal job, I had a baby… but I'll keep seeing it pop up," he laughed.
In the end, Harley feels kind of lucky to have his identity and life immortalized in a good light. Unlike some other famous meme subjects.
