This week’s Quaker video: When these four Earlham College students were standing in line for hot dogs, one of them cracked a joke about something being a “Quaker Problem”. Little did they know it would become a full-on international Quaker meme within a matter of weeks.
Transcript
Taylor
If we were to awkward turtle, it would have to be like this.
Jonathan and Taylor
You don’t have arms! Get those arms out of there.
QUAKER PROBLEMS
Taylor Satterthwaite
I’m Taylor Satterthwaite. I’m from Berea, Kentucky.
Miyoshi Gonzalez
I’m Miyoshi Gonzalez. I’m from Chapel Hill, North Carolina.
Anna Schonwald
I’m Anna Schonwald. I’m from Barrington, New Hampshire.
Jonathan Birkel
I’m Jonathan Birkel. I’m from Richmond, Indiana.
Taylor Satterthwaite
We were all standing in line together for hot dogs
Jonathan Birkel
(or something)
Taylor Satterthwaite
…and this was at the start of our freshman year when it was still warm and you could eat hotdogs outside. Something came up in conversation and we were talking about it and we all agreed that it was a Quaker problem.
So I found a picture of George Fox just by doing a google image search, and he was going imitates Fox. I figure he’s probably experiencing some kind of spiritual awakening or something. Within that night, between the three of us (I think Jonathan didn’t find out about it until a little while late) we came up with thirty to fifty of them.
Jonathan Birkel
It was kind of an amusing story. I actually found out about it the next morning. The previous Summer I had been on the Quaker Youth Pilgrimage and so we had a Facebook page for all the people who had been on that. One of my friends posted it on there, and I was like, “hmm! I should tell my friends here at Earlham about that!” It attests to the ridiculous speed at which things spread through the internet.
Taylor Satterthwaite
You can upload an image and then anyone can add a caption. It was pretty simple. I don’t know, within the week or so, there were two hundred or three hundred or something.
Jonathan Birkel
The majority of them were within the first couple of weeks. It slowed down a little bit after that.
Taylor Satterthwaite
…and people from Britain were posting them and people from my own youth group were posting them, like, “hey, look at this!”
Anna Schonwald
History teachers believing that we don’t exist is a thing that happens! It happened to me.
Jonathan Birkel
It’s kind of a stereotypical Quaker problem.
Miyoshi Gonzalez
Except there was a couple of times when peoples’ teachers thought that Quaker only live in Philadelphia.
Taylor Satterthwaite
I know that one of the first ones that we actually made on the image was, “No, not like oatmeal!” Which is also a thing.
Anna Schonwald
Oh, I think there was one about sneezing in silence. There’s definitely one about falling asleep.
Taylor Satterthwaite
One of my favorites was, “Locks too shaggy!”
“Leather jacket way squeakier than leather britches.”
Miyoshi Gonzalez
There’s definitely a few about acronyms. Like, “went to Quaker college. Don’t know all of the acronyms.”
Jonathan Birkel
“Went to Quaker college, don’t know professors’ last names”
“Ran out of space on car for bumper stickers”
Taylor Satterthwaite
“Business Meeting minutes take hours”