Friday, August 13 started off just like any other day for Mitch Bowey.
The 34-year-old from Sydney was working in his role at a captioning company, spending his day transcribing spoken English into subtitles.
But by the end of his shift, a legend had been born.
His name: Ken Behrens.
A week ago today, Mr Bowey had been assigned a mammoth task — captioning the ACT's COVID-19 press conference on the second day of the territory's lockdown.
Mr Bowey explained to ABC Radio Canberra that to do this, he used voice-to-text software to transcribe most of the words, before changing any typos and fixing up any grammatical problems.
But there was one word Mr Bowey did not catch in time.
"I will admit I've had trouble with the word 'Canberrans' before," he said.
So when the ACT's Chief Minister Andrew Barr took a moment to thank Canberrans for their hard work embracing the snap lockdown, the captions suggested that Mr Barr had thanked 'Ken Behrens'.
For the thousands of Canberrans who suddenly found themselves confined to their homes in the midst of a lockdown, the mistake became welcome comic relief and quickly spread across social media.
The Canberra Raiders NRL team changed their name on social media to Ken Behren Raiders, merchandise — including T-shirts reading 'We are all Ken Behrens' — sprung up overnight, ACT Policing posted about Ken Behrens's compliance with restrictions – and even the Check In CBR app was across the latest territory-wide joke.
When a friend posted about the mistake on social media, Mr Bowey initially thought someone else was responsible for the typo.
"I thought 'oh someone's made a mistake' ... I was sort of sitting there thinking 'yeah I'll get the juicy goss'," he joked.
"As soon as I saw the screenshot, I just had that heart-sinking moment."
He realised it was him. He had created Ken Behrens.
Mr Bowey said he always had a soft spot for the national capital, and being a part of something that had brought "Ken Behrens" so much joy in the middle of a lockdown was a silver lining.
"We [captioners] always sort of joke that, you know, you're not a real captioner until you've had some sort of absolute clanger go to air," he said.
