my co-worker was america's most viral man for a day
and i somehow was in the middle of it all...
this story is honestly so ridiculous i thought i might as well write it up to look back at in 20 years and laugh.
tldr; over the last week, a man named Soham Parekh took over the internet and became one of, if not the most famous man in the US - even ranking as #4 trending across all of Twitter.
you can learn his story through the million articles online, for example this one. but the main reason for his virality is that he was exposed for working at 3-4 startups at a time, for multiple years.
and turns out one of those startups is called sync. labs, which also happens to be the startup i work at…
i woke up at 10:13am on a fine wednesday morning, as the sun shone brightly through the blinds, illuminating the apartment.
yawning, i slowly got out of bed, looking forward to a nice, peaceful day.
of course, reality hit a few seconds later, and i realized i had a meeting in one minute.
the first thing my co-worker said to me when i got on was, “bro, our former co-worker is going viral.”
and there he was, Soham Parekh, whom i had worked with for months, being discussed across Twitter.
naturally, we were all shocked - we had known this man really well lol.
a few months earlier, we had collaborated on a fun little video showing his quest for getting a microwave for our office. it was pure jokes, and not a single bit of the video had anything to do with… anything.
the video didn’t even end up getting posted, getting thrown into the archives along with the rest of our scrapped ideas.
months passed as the saga of the microwave man lay abandoned in that endless pile, left undiscovered by the world.
three months later, i realized while scrolling through the endless memes about Soham, that nobody really knows this man.
thinking a comedic short that isn’t in any way harmful to him or us would be fun to post, i hit upload, and slowly the video started picking up views.
over the night, the view count just kept growing. in the morning i woke to 200k views, and a nice little surprise:
the video was featured in news articles globally.
instagram, tiktok, youtube, news, and of course twitter - the microwave man was officially an international phenomenon.
news outlets were eager to jump on the story, and i even got a DM from NBC news looking for an interview.
even a week later, i keep stumbling across - or getting sent - new articles that have picked up our content. it’s still pretty wild to see how far it’s spread.
there’s no real conclusion to this story. Soham went viral, and we happened to get caught in that hype.
i’m not going to judge him for his actions; he admits that what he did is wrong, and only time will tell if he’ll change his ways.
but if there’s one lesson that i’m taking away from all of this, it’s that you really never know what happens when you create something.
a silly video of a co-worker petitioning to get a microwave in the office somehow months later became the go-to source on who he is, helping humanize him against the many fake stories about him that were previously circulating the internet.
the real question though, is why we still don’t have a microwave in our office…