Security camera captures woman dancing like no one’s watching after landing a job

Edi­tor’s note: This arti­cle was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished on Octo­ber 27, 2020. It has since been updat­ed.

Have you ever been so over­come with joy that you sim­ply had to break into a hap­py dance on the spot? Twen­ty-one-year-old Kay­al­lah Jones has, and her hap­py dance spread mil­lions of smiles across the inter­net as peo­ple joined in on the for­mer­ly unhoused young wom­an’s joy amid the stream of mis­for­tu­nate events in 2020. A 13-sec­ond-long secu­ri­ty cam­era footage shows Jones break­ing out into a cel­e­bra­to­ry dance in a park­ing lot after acing an inter­view for a wait­ress­ing job. Post­ed online by Dakara Spence, the man­ag­er of the Atlanta restau­rant where Jones inter­viewed, the video cur­rent­ly gained 1.4 mil­lion views on Insta­gram.

 

“So I just hired this young girl and this was her response,” Spence wrote on Insta­gram, post­ing the video. In the clip, Jones is seen walk­ing out of The Spot—a sports bar and restau­rant in Atlanta, Georgia—after inter­view­ing for the job. She stops in the park­ing lot for a few sec­onds and after check­ing to see if there’s any­one in the vicin­i­ty, spon­ta­neous­ly breaks out into a lit­tle hap­py dance on the spot. She then con­tin­ues walk­ing away non­cha­lant­ly like noth­ing hap­pened.

Accord­ing to Atlanta’s CBS 46, Jones had been unhoused for two years and lost a num­ber of jobs due to the pan­dem­ic. Her life com­plete­ly changed on Sep­tem­ber 29, 2020, when she man­aged to per­form well in the inter­view and impressed Spence with her enthu­si­as­tic spir­it. “When I got out­side I did­n’t know that the cam­eras caught me,” Jones told the net­work. Spence revealed that she while saw some­thing spe­cial in the young woman when she inter­viewed her, it was the dance that real­ly sealed the deal. “She had a great ener­gy I felt it as soon as she walked in she seemed real­ly pos­i­tive,” said Spence.

 

“I called her phone and I said I’m going to hire you and I seen your hap­py dance so you can con­tin­ue danc­ing,” she revealed. “She was just scream­ing through the phone and it was just a beau­ti­ful moment for me.” Jones is now offi­cial­ly a serv­er at The Spot and she is extreme­ly grate­ful to Spence for chang­ing her life almost overnight both by giv­ing her the job and post­ing the video on social media, which has since opened many doors to the pair. “Ms. Dakara did­n’t know but I was going through so much and at that point when she gave me this chance and this oppor­tu­ni­ty,” she said.

“I was elat­ed, excit­ed and so over­whelmed to the point where no one under­stood how hap­py and accom­plished I felt at that moment,” Jones added. Speak­ing to jour­nal­ist Jamie Kennedy, she rec­om­mend­ed that oth­ers also make it a habit to indulge in a lit­tle hap­py dance “any­time they’re hap­py, any­time you get a bless­ing, any­time you had a great oppor­tu­ni­ty and you have some­thing that you were work­ing towards for years or months, or pray­ing for.” The pair also made an appear­ance in The Ellen DeGeneres Show recent­ly, where Spence explained that she felt a spe­cial con­nec­tion to Jones because she saw a bit of her­self in the young woman.

“I just saw myself in her because I know what it’s like to be turned away from a job. Recent­ly, I had oth­er work some­where in Geor­gia and I got turned away for my hair. They told me I can’t return back until I have put like some type of gel in it. And I just quit. I was like I don’t want to stay here no more. I said, if I ever have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to pass a job on to some­body else, I would nev­er turn them away,” she revealed. “And then when [Jones] came in, I was like, I like her. She’s great. She made me laugh the entire time. So she’s amaz­ing. I love her.”