A Sundial Feature Article:
We’ve all done it before–looked at something odd, looked away, realized it was odd, and suddenly looked at it again, really thinking about it only after the second look. The Double-Take. Some of us are absentminded and can take a few seconds, or even minutes for a double-take, but last month, Columbus resident Brian Mills did something extraordinary—he broke the world record for the longest time in between the two takes of a double-take.
Exactly two years and three months ago, Brian Mills, a 31-year-old real-estate agent, was sitting at his favorite cafe on High Street, when he saw a man walk out of Wendy’s. This man had an afro, and was eating a burger slowly…deliberately, staring right at Brian. Brian saw the strange afro-guy, but he didn’t notice the strange afro-guy. He continued eating his meal and went on with the rest of the day not noticing what had happened. Days, months, and finally years passed, until one day, sitting at the same cafe watching an episode of Rizzoli and Isles on his Ipad, he suddenly glanced at the Wendy’s and blurted out in front of his wife, “That man with the burger and the afro is staring right at me!”
“What?” His wife said.
“Yeah, where’d he go?! He was just there! That was weird!”
“Whatever, honey, pass the Sriracha.”
He called The Sundial World Record Office (which works closely with Guinness and the UN), and reported that he had a double-take which lasted approximately 762 days. “Yeah, I guess I just didn’t notice it until a couple years later,” he said in an interview with The Sundial. Our reporters are still trying to ascertain the whereabouts of the strange afro-guy with the burger at Wendy’s, but so far he could not be reached for an interview. The world record for longest double-take was previously held by Steve Gibbs for taking a year and a half to notice that his wife got her hair done.
-Ben Fogle, Contributor