Everyone loves a good bedtime story.
Just ask UT student Andrew Kochamba, whose tweet about resident assistant Quamir “Q” Boddie reading him a bedtime story for his birthday went viral in February.
Kochamba, an advertising major from Franklin, Tennessee, said at the beginning of the school year, Boddie sent a survey to his residents asking what he could do to make their year better. Kochamba replied that he wanted Boddie to read him a bedtime story on his birthday.
When Boddie showed up to read the story Leo the Late Bloomer, Kochamba’s roommate snapped the pictures that Kochamba later tweeted.
“I thought it was funny that he actually showed up,” said Kochamba. “Q is really cool and approachable.”
Once the tweet was posted on February 23, it quickly took off and has since been retweeted more than 14,000 times and liked more than 63,000 times. According to Twitter analytics it has reached more than two million people.
Kochamba says it was a snowball effect and was fun to watch the numbers go up. He realized the tweet was going to get a lot of attention when the website Mashable tweeted a story about it the next day.
“They have eight million followers on Twitter, so I knew it was going to get bigger,” he said.
The story has been retold by various news outlets and blogs; WBIR, WVLT, Good Morning America, Cosmopolitan, BuzzFeed, Bookstr, and College Candy.
Now that the buzz has calmed down, Kochamba says not much has changed, “I have more Twitter followers now, but when I get recognized it’s just people asking if I’m Q’s resident. I’ll see random stuff now and then; my parents like to send me links.”
This isn’t Kochamba’s first brush with Internet stardom.
As a senior at Franklin High School, Kochamba mounted a successful social media campaign to shadow Jimmy Fallon of The Tonight Show for his “Senior Shadow Day.”
Boddie is no stranger to the spotlight either. The 21-year-old is a member of the UT Singers, an a cappella ensemble. Cosmopolitan magazine called Boddie “hands down, the greatest kid of all time.”