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The whole thing happened because he forgot to lock his office door, reveals Political Science professor Robert E. Kelly, of the viral moment that was captured live during his BBC interview last Friday when his adorable children came crashing into the room of the family’s high-rise Busan, South Korea apartment building and launched a thousand memes in the process. Speaking out to the Wall Street Journal for the first time since the incident, Kelly is finally providing some behind-the-scenes details at what he calls the “comedy of errors” that forced he and his wife to hide out with their phones in airplane mode for several days as they waited in vain for the whole thing to blow over.
The children have now been identified as Kelly’s four-year-old daughter Marion and eight-month-old son James. It was around 7 p.m. at the time of the interview, and Marion was still in a “hippity-hoppity mood” from celebrating her birthday in kindergarten earlier that day. Kelly’s wife, Kim Jung-A, was focused on recording the live segment on the family’s TV in the living room with her phone so that her husband would have a copy, when Marion — to her apparent delight — saw her father onscreen and decided to pay him a visit down the hall, closely followed by her brother.
So yes, that would be a conformation that the man’s poor wife only realized the gravity of the situation when she saw it literally unfolding on the television screen in front of her, which was on a few seconds delay. Hence, the few seconds delay in retrieving the children from the room.
Kelly still takes full responsibility for what happened, and now that he’s finally coming to terms with the surreal mistake “that turned [his] family into YouTube stars,” he’s able to see the humor in the situation.
Mr. Kelly describes his reaction as a mixture of surprise, embarrassment and amusement but also love and affection. The couple says they weren’t mad and didn’t scold the children. “I mean it was terribly cute,” Mr. Kelly said. “I saw the video like everybody else. My wife did a great job cleaning up a really unanticipated situation as best she possibly could… It was funny. If you watch the tape I was sort of struggling to keep my own laughs down. They’re little kids and that’s how things are.”
Be that as it may, but we bet he’ll never forget to lock his office door again, that’s for damn sure. Here’s the original video that started it all:
(Via WSJ)