“You’ve got to laugh at yourself, eh.”
That’s the way Dion Rountree, better known as Old Mate, sees things.
The Paeroa man, who runs Old Mates Property Services with his wife, Lou, was reversing his ride-on lawnmower down the driveway before disaster struck.
Their surveillance camera captured the moment he reversed over a rake and came face to face with the handle.
The real-life “rake take” was uploaded to Facebook and led to the handyman becoming a viral-video internet sensation after “raking up” more than 3.2 million views.
It features Dion turning to check behind him while running over the rake, followed by a swift whack to the face by the handle and a flurry of frustration and colourful language.
The rake was lying on the driveway and when the back wheel of the lawnmower went over the tines, the handle “just full force came flying up” and hit him, Dion said.
“It was a hell of a dong. It was like getting smacked in the head with a cricket bat,” he told The Profile.
He shared the video with friends and after some encouragement, decided to post it up for the world to see.
“I thought everyone needs to see this. Even though it’s not good, you know, the temper tantrum at the end and it wasn’t really a side of me that anyone should see, but it’s too good not to share”, he said.
After a few days, the video was sitting at 140,000 views.
“We were just like, ‘we’re famous. We’ve made it, eh?’
“Then it got picked up again and it went up over a million views in a day,” Dion said.
“Now it’s away, now it’s cooking. Once it hit the US, it went absolutely bonkers.”
The viral moment has resulted in more than 3000 new followers to their Old Mates Property Services Facebook account from people all around the world.
A lot of the comments from people compared Dion’s situation to something that could happen to Looney Tunes cartoon character Wile E. Coyote or The Simpsons character Sideshow Bob, who was known for stepping on a rake and getting hit in the face.
They needed to silence their notifications because their phones kept dinging, they said.
The infamous rake collision, which was audible in the video, caused a “bit of a bump” on Dion’s head.
“I had a good little line down my forehead and a bit of a bump for a few days. But I’ve got a pretty hard head,” he said.
How the rake ended up on the driveway though was actually the work of another little human.
The couple’s two-year-old son, John, is a helpful young entrepreneur who follows in his parents footsteps and also accompanies them on jobs.
From time to time, John will lend a hand and place items around the property such as a spanner in the sand pit or in the viral-video’s case, a rake on the driveway.
He was a little celebrity in his own right.
People got to know John when the family had their former business Old Mates Pizza and Pasta in Paeroa.
“I think half of the customers that ring us just want to see Johnny because they [saw] him growing up in the shop.”
One thing is for sure, Dion said he might need to wear a hard hat when he unloaded the mower at the yard, or at least put the rake back where it belonged.
Dion and Lou joked about the time they shared a video where they gave away free labour and only received around six entries and followers and around 3000 views, but a video of his misfortune raked in a hefty response.
“If I’d known me getting injured was what would attract attention, I would’ve been putting that shit on the internet ages ago.”
By DAVIDDA HIKATANGATA
