White Rose: Meet the Leeds man who went viral on Facebook after fixing McDonald's sign at shopping centre
A Leeds man has gone viral on Facebook after posting about his decision to fix the McDonald’s sign at the White Rose Shopping Centre.
Steve Lovell, 50, of Rothwell, said the McDonald’s sign in the White Rose Centre’s food court had been missing the counter from the letter D “for years.”
Deciding to take matters into his own hands, Steve took a photo of the sign to get the scale right and cut out the shape from some Foamex plastic.
He has since gone viral after his post about the fix on the ‘Dull Men’s Club’ Facebook page received over 56,000 likes from people around the world.
Talking to the Yorkshire Evening Post, Steve said: “I had been aware for a while that one of the two bits of signage at White Rose was missing the inside of a D and I eventually just got round to thinking I might as well take a picture of that, measure it up and put a bit of plastic onto it.
“Then as I was running into the cinema I thought ‘ah I’ll put that into the Dull Men’s Club group’ as a silly throwaway post that I didn’t even think would be accepted, but by time I came out of the cinema it had over 9,000 likes.
“People have just been going crazy for it even though it’s the most trivial little thing and then over the course of the next few days it really exploded.”
Working a phone-based job by day, Steve spices up his life through a range of different artistic projects.
He fills his spare time making costumes, props, graphics and has even completed a tube-style ‘Orderaround’ pub map of both Leeds and of Yorkshire as a whole.
Despite never having worked for them, White Rose Shopping Centre humorously announced Steve as their ‘employee of the month’ for March, even allowing him to return to make the repair more permanent.
Steve added: “White Rose Centre as it turns out were fully aware of the unauthorised repairs I’d been carrying out and even gave me their ‘employee of the month’ award which was quite funny considering I’ve never worked for them.
“I went back along on Sunday afternoon to complete the repairs and they let me have a security guard with me so people wouldn’t think I was vandalising the place.
“They deserve a lot of credit as it would have been so easy for them to get the hump and say ‘don’t touch our property’ but instead they’ve seen it for the good natured effort that it was.”
Following extensive research into the McDonald’s branding guidelines, Steve decided against cutting the repairs from plastic board second time round, instead utilising the 3D modelling application Fusion 360 to model the new counters.
He has now carried out similar repairs to a missing ‘O’ counter at the site, although has no plans to become the centre’s unofficial repair man.
Taking to social media, White Rose Centre said: “We hold our hands up, this one is on us. Thank you Steve, our March employee of the month, for your selfless work – we’re lovin’ it.”