Today is my last day at BuzzFeed News and it’s a sad day

in part b/c I came so so so close but never caught my white whale. This man.

Who is "The Worst Person You Know"?

Let me show you how close I got:

For those of you not already acquainted, this is a photo from the iconic article "Heartbreaking: The Worst Person You Know Just Made A Great Point" from the satirical website ClickHole. https://twitter.com/ClickHole/status/960568745298223104

The article captured a specific bitter, begrudging feeling so well that the photograph has become internet shorthand for that emotion.

Given how many people have seen this man's face, I wanted to know: who is this man? Does he know how famous he is? Is he actually the worst person?

After googling to see if anyone else had found him & checking Know Your Meme, I started looking into it. https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/worst-person-you-know-made-a-great-point

ClickHole doesn't credit a source on their website (and they never responded to my email asking for it) so I downloaded the image and looked at the EXIF data. Nothing.

A reverse image search brought up a million results, predictably. All the ways the image has been used over the years makes it hard to find a source.

So to eliminate that, I searched for the image and limited results to the dates before article was published. (Feb 2018).

Turns out the Onion has used it before in 2016. So I excluded results after then.

I couldn't find anything helpful.

In my spare time, I would occasionally just go through pages of results for different search terms, looking for any hints. Zilch!

Then, in February, a breakthrough thanks to some help from other curious people:

By chance, I stumbled across a tweet where @rachelmillman asked if anyone knew who he was.

Buried in her replies, @iamtherog gave some details i hadn't seen.

The image was no longer on Getty's website and I couldn't find an archived version of the Getty page which would give me some more details.

But I was able through a combination of the search terms look for other websites that used the image.

That's how I found this 2014 page "Know the Risk of Vasectomy" from Indian health website Onlymyhealth, amid many other results.

Halfway down the page, I found him squeezed between other stock photos.

Like dozens of times before, I downloaded the image and looked at the image data.

I couldn't believe my eyes. There was a date: 19 April 2014.

And even more incredibly, in the creator field, it listed a name. Albert Mollon.

All it took was a quick Google to track Mollon down. His name returned a hit for other stock photos he had on Getty Images which made me confident he was the guy.

I found his Instagram. So I sent him a message asking for more details. And then I waited.

I've messaged him 30+ times in the last few months. He's responded a few times.

At first he said he'd get in touch with the model. Then he stopped responding.

I asked him to pass on a message.

Then I just asked if Mollon would answer a few questions.

Last night I pulled out the big guns: "it's my last day", I whined.

He responded: "sorry i don't interest about it."

So that's where I am at. Heartbreaking.

(PS if you know this man PLEASE let me know my DMs are open)

oh also i'm looking for a job lol pls hire me

UPDATE: