Man degraded while chasing world record
A YouTuber has recorded himself being publicly degraded by strangers on the street during a gruelling 38-hour effort to beat a world record.
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A YouTuber has captured the moment he was publicly degraded by strangers on a street during a gruelling 38-hour effort to break a world record.
The streamer, who goes by the need of “Norme,” successfully stood still for 38 hours, and naturally he recorded the entire thing.
Streamers are known to record themselves doing anything, and many of them have amassed millions of followers online by turning some of the most mundane, bare-bones ideas into drawn-out streams that can last for hours, and sometimes even days.
Standing in a mall just down the road from the famous Santa Monica Pier in Los Angeles, Norme turns on the camera, and tells the audience of the grand journey he’s about to embark on.
“I’m breaking the world record for the longest time standing still. Light work, easy,” he said
In the bottom left corner of the screen, a phone is set up to display the time to the audience – six zeros.
The streamer, dressed in black pants, a white T-shirt, a caramel-coloured jacket and a brown cowboy hat, seems optimistic, energetic, and ready to tackle the task.
A passer-by named Bobby stops by to offer some kind words and a fist-bump.
Bobby turns to face the camera, revealing a slogan that says “believe in yourself” plastered across his T-shirt.
As the timer starts, and Norme cements himself into the position he’ll be taking for the next 38 hours, it looks like everything might just be okay.
Twelve minutes into the stream, the first ne’er-do-wells appear, sharpie-in-hand, before applying a fake twirly moustache on the human statue, who diligently remains in place.
The college-aged males appear to revel in his discomfort.
“I like your moustache dude,” one of them says, taunting the unimpressed-looking streamer.
They take his cowboy hat, and continue to taunt him.
“I low-key might keep this … a free cowboy hat bro? He can’t do anything about it. He can look at me weird like that but realistically he’s not gonna do anything about me stealing his hat,” the delinquent says.
They give his hat back, taunt him some more, discuss whether to non-consensually put a hot dog in his mouth, and then move along.
Well adjusted young men, clearly.
Two hours later, a pair of young women come along and do exactly that, leaving him standing alone with an uncooked hot dog in his mouth.
A good Samaritan removes the glizzy a few minutes later.
Day turns to night, and seven hours in we find our hero struggling against his own eyelids as sleep threatens to take him.
Nevertheless, he battles on into the next day.
In an effort to make the stream more interactive, and in order to literally keep his eyes open, Norme sets out a number of implements which he allows members of the public to use on him in order to keep him awake.
Twenty-two hours into the stream, a man approaches him, before noticing the tools laid out on the ground.
“Chat, imma feel bad doing something to this guy,” he says.
“I can’t do it.”
The man then grabs a spray-paint can, and tags the entire front of Norme’s body in black paint.
It’s not Banksy, but it looks like it’ll keep Norme awake for a little bit longer.
Mercifully, the man then provides him with water.
At 25 hours, a man enters the frame with a bottle of mustard in hand.
“I’m sorry,” he says before pouring mustard over Norme’s face.
The man removes the cowboy hat, which has perched defiantly on Norme’s head for more than a day at this stage, and blasphemously replaces it with a MAGA hat, before cracking an egg over Norme’s head.
The blow is devastating, and all of a sudden the final 13 hours are looking much further away.
They cover him in a blanket, and leave him alone, mustard-covered, egg-rinsed and borderline delirious.
For the final 13 hours, he is poked, prodded, policed and harassed as he desperately tries to stay awake and alert enough to hold himself together.
Night falls, and he makes his way onto the home stretch.
He begins talking to himself at 35 hours, and as his sanity slips away into the ether, he presents a sorry sight.
“I’ve got all this s**t on my face, I probably look like a tweaker,” he says to nobody.
“Oh my God, what is happening to me?”
He is met with the silence of an empty mall.
Finally, mercifully, as Norme begins to truly lose the plot, the clock reaches the thirty-eight hour mark and he stumbles towards the camera in desperate, pitiful relief.
Was it worth it?
Only Norme knows.
Originally published as Man degraded while chasing world record
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