i-am-meme

Around 2010, I was working at Goodwill. I was bored. I grabbed a cardboard box and put it on my head. Someone took a photo. I thought it was funny, so I posted it to i-am-bored.com. I don't even remember what title I gave it, but based on later findings I believe it was "Found this box at work. I am a robot." Upload, move on, forget about it.

Recently I wanted to see if there was a backup of that original post somewhere. i-am-bored.com was long gone. I looked on archive.org with no luck. I started Googling stuff like "box head robot" and "cardboard box on head funny" trying to track it down. I didn't find my photo. What I found instead was a demotivational poster of my photo, with a word I'd never seen before written underneath it in big white letters:

Bukagalvis.

A photo of me with a box on my head had become a meme. Not like a huge viral meme — more like some guy in Lithuania made an image that a few people saw. And it had a name.

Bukagalvis is a Lithuanian word. It literally translates to "blunt-head" — from bukas (blunt or dull) and galva (head). It basically means blockhead or dimwit. Some dictionaries translate it as "cabbage-head." One old Yahoo Answers post even lists it as the Lithuanian word for "zombie."

I don't speak Lithuanian.

Tracking It Down

Recently I decided to actually trace where this image ended up. I ran it through TinEye, Google Lens, and a bunch of searching, and here's what I found:

demotyvacijos.lt (May 30, 2011) — This is the earliest dated version of the meme I can find with the "Bukagalvis" name attached. A user called "MinistryOfSound" posted my photo to this Lithuanian demotivational poster site with the caption simply reading "Bukagalvis." One person commented on it: "minecraft !!!" — probably because the box on my head looked like a Minecraft character. So within about a year of me posting the original photo, it was already in Lithuania with a name.

codyrapol.com (November 2013) — My image showed up on an English-language meme blog, on a page tagged "fffffffuuuuuuuuuuuu" (the old rage comics thing). The filename here is the most interesting part: Found-this-box-at-work.-I-am-a-robot.jpg. That might be close to my original title, or it might be how someone else captioned it when they reposted it. Either way, by 2013 it was circulating in rage comic and meme communities.

desmotivaciones.es (2015–2021) — A Spanish-language demotivational poster site. My photo shows up there in at least four different posts across six years, uploaded by multiple users. One post from September 2015 pairs it with Danbo, that little cardboard box robot character from the manga Yotsuba&! (I don't watch anime, I just learned all this this week) — so someone thought the resemblance was worth pointing out. The image kept getting reposted there through at least 2021.

ujarani.com (October 2016) — A Polish content-sharing site, kind of like a Polish Reddit. My image appeared there as a small thumbnail, probably embedded in a comment or post.

YouTube — I found it used as the background for what appears to be a YouTube video. No idea what the video is about or what language it's in. I commented on it to say that was me with a box on my head and the person that posted the video hearted my comment.

GitHub — A Hungarian developer based in Budapest appears to be using my photo (or something from it) as their profile picture. Just some random guy's GitHub avatar is a photo of me with a box on my head at Goodwill. The internet is a strange place.

Known Sightings

Here's everywhere I've confirmed the image has appeared, roughly in order:

If you've seen it somewhere else, let me know. I'm genuinely curious how far this thing has traveled.

So Now What?

You can buy an autographed print of the meme from my other website: notkmart.com. I'm limiting it to 50.

— Kyle