In July, a new meme was born after this now-famous photo was posted to Reddit.
Tamer Cosgun
Tamer Cosgun, a friend of these eight guys depicted in the photo, posted it originally.
It rose to the top of the r/oddlysatisfying subreddit before it quickly made its way to the front page of Reddit overall.
Joseph Ghaemi, the eighth guy — at the end of the line in the photo — told BuzzFeed News the friends were all at Wimbledon together when the photo was taken.
Although commenters suspected they intentionally posed in a perfect line for the selfie, Ghaemi confirmed that their friend Fraser, the guy at the very front, snapped it randomly.
“It was genuinely a one-time fluke,” Ghaemi said.
Ghaemi, who is 25 (as are the rest of the guys), said they found out the image had become a viral meme from someone at work.
“My colleagues told me it had gone viral the next day when I was at work,” he said. “None of us could believe the attention it got.”
He told BuzzFeed News they thought a lot of the jokes about them were hilarious but that they also found the assumptions people made about them “interesting”…
“It was impossible to read through all the comments, but we enjoyed the ones we did read, and the edits were hilarious,” he said.
He said the guys all met up after and talked about the various things people deduced about them online, not knowing who they were at all.
“Some interesting assumptions were being made about each of us,” he added.
…because the “real” them didn’t quite match up to all the internet jokes. Ghaemi wanted to clear up some assumptions about them, mostly about their backgrounds and socioeconomic statuses.
“One of the funny parts for me was how people were saying we all look alike (‘white boys’), even though I am half Iranian and tan,” Ghaemi said.
He then explained that the comments about their wealth were inaccurate too.
“There were comments on how we were rich kids with ‘rich daddies’ and all work in the city — not true!” he explained.
The guys are all originally from Scotland and met at the University of Dundee. They now all work in various cities around the UK.
For the official record, as many people were also trying to guess the guys’ names, they are (from front to back): Fraser, Andrew, Josh, Lorne, Neil, Dave, James, and Joe.
But the guys mostly wanted to let everyone know that they really did take it all in good humor and fun.
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