When he was 16 years old, Alex Lee was living in Frisco, Texas, and picking up shifts at an Eldorado Parkway SuperTarget. He'd been an employee for three months when a customer took a photo of him at work and posted it online in late October 2014. A British teen saw the shot a week later and posted it to her (now defunct) Twitter account with the caption "YOOOOOOOOOOO."
The rest is internet history. The tweet went explosively viral, turned into a meme, and Lee was catapulted into online fame. As the photo ping-ponged around the internet, Lee worked a Sunday shift at the big-box retailer, according to The New York Times. He noticed his checkout line was growing unusually long, and his manager, Molly, a senior in high school, showed him the photo on her phone. As the attention intensified, Molly moved him to the stockroom for the remainder of his shift. When he clocked in on November 2, 2014, Lee had 144 Twitter followers. When his mom picked him up from work that evening, he had 100,000. The teen told J-14 that his phone number had been leaked and his phone, overwhelmed with notifications, was frozen.
Within a few hours, online users had turned Lee into a global celebrity. "The Internet owns him. He doesn't own his fans … and he certainly isn't the agent of his own enormous, newfound fame," The Washington Post's Caitlin Dewey put it.