Editor’s note: This is a special story from our friend Ben. You can follow Ben on Twitter. This story was originally written like two years ago, but it took forever to actually use the thing mentioned in the story.

This is a story of a RMNB miracle. The twitter handle for this beloved site has been @russianmachine since its inception. That is because some genius snatched the @RMNB handle back in 2007, probably with hopes of getting famous. We know this because his one and only tweet was this:

You may be saying, “Well, Ben, finder’s keepers.” And normally, I’d be like “Yep!”. But since April 30, 2007, that has been the only tweet that the @RMNB handle has ever tweeted. Day after day, month after month, year after year would go by and we never got an update. No, “All done” or “Yum!”… just “Breakfast !!”.. forever. And at some point in 2015 and 2016, ya boi Peter Hassett tweeted these delicious morsels:

A little morbid, but it was at that point I knew what I had to do. For the last three years I have been trying to figure out who this Rui is. Here’s the problem: Egg picture, no bio or background image, only following 24 people (mostly political), and only 10 followers (some lost fans of this website). Where the hell do you begin? I started with the followers, the people that actively chose to follow this riveting account.

I began by following anyone I didn’t recognize and would wait for the follow back so I could slide into those DMs. And then, I waited, and waited, and for the sake of brevity, I waited some more. Until I tweeted at one of @RMNB’s followers asking for help and I received a DM. What’s this!?

This follower of @RMNB gave me the first glint of hope I had in a long time. He gave me the possible name and email of who he thought the handle belong to. And over the next year, I would send the email address he gave me emails requesting more information. I’ll spare you all the details but let’s just say here’s a graph of every email I sent over the past year with dates and word count shown. I went a little hard in the beginning. I was getting frustrated.

With all these emails, you’d think “Oh wow, you definitely heard back.” And you’d be wrong. Over the year I began to think I was muted, or blocked, or even worse: ignored! But it turns out, it was just the wrong email address. Back to the drawing board. So, I began to take a look at the profiles of the other followers of @RMNB, and it just so happens one of them has his LinkedIn profile in his twitter. What did I do next? You guessed it, I connected with him on LinkedIn. After he accepted my request, I sent him a message asking if he knew who the account holder of the @RMNB account was. And on December 17, at 5:45 AM EST, I received this: “He his my brother. Make an offer!”

The good news, I found him. The bad news… money. After a few interactions, some insider information, and the realization I was GROSSLY out of my league to be in a negotiation, I contacted the jerk that started me down this whole path. I messaged Peter to find out what the site would be willing to do to get the handle.

So with a little guidance from Peter and Ian, and the confidence of a mediocre white man, I messaged the owner of @RMNB on LinkedIn. And after a schooling in the art of negotiation, some money, and the promise of Capitals tickets if he was ever in Washington, D.C., the @RMNB account was mine. Now, you may think that’s the end of the story, right? But there was one last thing I needed to do before completely turning over the account:

On behalf of everyone at Russian Machine Never Breaks, we congratulate Ben for completing this odyssey and thank him for his kindness and friendship. As of today, we’re officially at twitter.com/rmnb