He shrugged off the comments, adding with a laugh: “I’ve got a lot of photos with that look – that’s my look.” “I’ve read comments that say ‘he has the face of a Nazi supremacist’ or that ‘there is no empathy in my look’,” he said. Messages came pouring in from across the English-speaking world, prompting his brother-in-law to remove the photo.īut it had already come to define García online. His day-to-day life rarely intersected with his online infamy, until a journalist dropped clues on how to find him in a series of social media posts. “I would go to work and everything was normal, nobody greeted me differently,” said García. Online he was super-famous – a quick search of the phrase ‘worst person you know’ pulls up almost 2bn results – but the fact that it was in English meant that few in his hometown or in the marketing agency where he works knew anything about it. He struggled to reconcile his online renown with his life in Molins de Rei, a municipality of 26,000 people near Barcelona. “Will people show up here, wanting to get to know me? Or wanting to beat me up?” “You wonder, okay, now what happens,” he told the Guardian. The picture had been used to illustrate a light-hearted piece about an obnoxious colleague who normally talks rubbish for once coming out with a killer observation about politics that no one can top. At the time he had paid little heed now as he sifted through the internet he realised he had unwittingly become a global meme. García vaguely recalled that in 2018 his brother had told him that the image had been used to illustrate an article for a US satirical magazine. The photo of García, then 34, turned out well – so well that the pair decided to upload it to the Getty Images catalogue. As his brother-in-law, who García asked not to be named, prepared for a photo session with an American writer, he asked García to stand in so that he could adjust for the light. He had posed for the photo in 2014 as he accompanied his brother-in-law, a professional photographer, on a work trip to Barcelona. Paranoia washed over him as he scrambled to piece together what had happened.

Why you no tell me meme