My Coworker Be Losing His Mind Bro / 9 Hour Work Day

Submission 15,608

Part of a series on Exploitables. [View Related Entries]

About

My Coworker Be Losing His Fucking Mind Bro, also known as 9 Hour Work Day Drawing, refers to a viral pen drawing made by a coworker of X / Twitter user @paid90forGG that was shared by them on the platform. Originally posted in January 2022, the drawing has since achieved cult status on X, being used as an exploitable meme format and its caption also being reused as a catchphrase.

Origin

On January 6th, 2022, X^[1] / Twitter user @paid90forGG posted a photograph of a pen drawing supposedly made by their coworker. The drawing depicts a stressed, grimacing man with his brain visible inside his head. In front of the man is an array of interconnected black rectangular shapes that also connect directly to the man's eyes. The post, captioned "my coworker be losing his fucking mind bro LMAOOOO what is this," received over 16,000 reposts and 127,000 likes in two years (post and drawing shown below, left and right).

Spread

In the following years, the image saw viral spread online through reposts on X, Instagram, Reddit, iFunny and other platforms. For example, on September 16th, 2022, iFunny^[2] user StolenMemes69 posted it, with the post garnering over 520 smiles in one year.

On March 17th, 2022, Redditor Big-up-Chazza posted the earliest discovered edit of the image, replacing the drawing in the photograph with a psychotic mural made by Portal character at Man. The post (shown below, left) garnered 830 upvotes in /r/Portal^[3] in two years. On May 14th, Redditor Adorable_Rate reused the caption from the X post in a post about the band Black Midi, which received over 250 upvotes in the /r/bmbmbm^[4] subreddit in two years (shown below, right).

The meme achieved more recognition in 2023 as it was continuously reposted online. Notably, on October 26th, 2023, X^[5] user @NintendoGCN quoted the original post, writing, "do we agree this is in top 10 tweets ever made." The quote post received over 1,700 reposts and 28,000 likes in two weeks (shown below, left). On November 5th, X^[6] user @YungStinker shared a photograph of the drawing tattooed onto his leg, which received over 1,500 reposts and 17,000 likes in one day (shown below, right).