Amid the endless stream of first-day-of-school photos filling Facebook feeds recently, an image of a sulking man is capturing hearts.
In it, 43-year-old Mount Prospect resident K.C. Walsh stands on his front porch, clad in a purple button-down shirt, gray slacks and sneakers. The straps of a blue-gray backpack are visible on his shoulders, slumped forward in protest. His face appears impatient, or frustrated, depending on your interpretation.
But it’s likely the caption — “7,237th day of work” — that has launched the photo to viral status. It has been shared nearly 29,000 times on Facebook, racked up more than 4,800 upvotes on Reddit and grabbed more than 2.2 million views on Imgur.
Walsh, executive director of Web services at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, said the joke wasn’t as well-thought-out as some of his other posts.
“The reason I kind of did it when I did it and all that is you’re scrolling through all these first-day-of-school photos and suddenly you see this guy,” Walsh said. “While I was mocking it, I also find some good heart in those sorts of pictures.”
Walsh said his wife took the photo of him on their kids’ first day of school. He said he didn’t post any images of his 12- and 9-year-old children since they were included in a group photo of neighborhood kids.
He said the popularity of the image surprised him, since none of his previous humorous posts gained much traction. A recent preplanned image shows him standing in front of an Apple store holding a busted window screen with the caption, “I am upset that Apple would not fix my broken screen!”
This time, he said, the rush of first-day-of-school photos made the joke highly relevant, especially to people on Facebook. On Reddit, where the post reached the top spot Thursday night, people seemed to think he needed a new job, he said.
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Walsh says his co-workers and bosses “loved” the post and that he is not unhappy at work.
He said he was not hesitant to take the privacy settings off the post since it featured only him but that he wouldn’t have done so with pictures of his kids. Walsh said they ask for Instagram accounts, but so far he hasn’t let them get on the Facebook-owned social image app.
“I don’t want my kids growing up thinking popularity on the Internet’s the thing you need to get,” Walsh said, acknowledging their excitement over his recent fame. “This isn’t helping now.”
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