Meet the Not-So-Famous Wikipedia High-Fivers

13 years later, they're still together
By John Johnson,  Newser Staff
Posted Feb 20, 2022 10:45 AM CST
She Tracked Down the Wikipedia High-Fivers
   (Wikipedia)

Look up "high five" on Wikipedia, and you'll come across four photos of the same couple demonstrating the "too slow" variation. In a piece at Input magazine, Annie Rauwerda writes that she became a little obsessed with the pair because "the pictures are endearing and capture a kind of humanity you don’t find in your average stock photo." Rauwerda set out to find them, using the one main clue she had—the photos were uploaded in 2008 by a user named Bgubitz. After some internet sleuthing, she discovered that Bgubitz was an accountant named Ben Gubitz, but he looked nothing like the male high-fiver. However, she found two familiar-looking faces among his Facebook friends. And, yes, Tim and Tamara O’Nan of Southern California turn out to be the answer to this obscure trivia question.

“It was my birthday, and we had just come back from a birthday dinner with some friends,” Tim says on a video chat while recalling the informal photo shoot. “You can see some unwrapped birthday gifts in the background, and I’m pretty sure the shirt I was wearing was a gift from Ben, who was the friend that convinced us to pose for photos for Wikipedia.” At the time, he and Tamara had been dating for about three years, but they would soon break up—only to get back together and marry. He runs a math-tutoring business, his wife is a physician’s assistant, and they have two young kids. Rauwerda brings the story full circle and has the couple recreate their now kind-of-famous poses. Read it in full here. (More Longform stories.)

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