Thank you, Google
Mannerly grandmother an Internet sensation,
A Google search history can be a window into someone’s soul. Just ask Ben Eckersley. Eckersley, 25, had popped round to his nan’s house for his weekly laundry run when he spotted possibly the most polite search request of all time typed into Google.
“Please translate these roman numerals mcmxcviii thank you,” May Ashworth had written in the search bar, as if it were a human person helping her out.
As he often does with his 86-yearold grandmother’s foibles, Eckersley snapped a picture of her laptop to tweet out and share a laugh with friends.
“I didn’t understand why on earth she’d done it,” he said.
She’d done it to find out when the Ladybird Book she picked up to add to her collection had been published.
“I know there’s nobody at the end of the line, but I thought, well somebody’s gone to the trouble of putting those answers in,” she told the Star. “It’s a human being that’s put it on the Internet in the first place, isn’t it? That’s what I’m thinking.”
Since he posted the photo a week ago, the story has travelled the Internet, with mentions on the BBC, NBC’s Today show, and their local paper near Manchester, U.K.
“She’s been really giddy about it,” Ben said.
“There’s been so much bad news recently that it seems to have cheered people up a bit.”
But she’s relying on him to relay the news, including when Google got wind of the request, and tweeted out its thanks from its U.K., U.S. and Argentinean accounts to more than 15 million followers.
“Dear Grandma, No thanks necessary. Sincerely, Google,” the U.S. account tweeted Wednesday.
“I don’t think she fully understood what she was looking at,” Ben said, though her jaw dropped at the number of followers.
Ashworth said she knows it was official because “it has the blue tick,” something Eckersley showed her.
Though she’s “slowly but surely” understanding the scope, she won’t be setting up her own Twitter account any time soon, he said.
Unlike her grandson, who she says is “mad on it,” Ashworth isn’t a big Internet user.
“They’re always on, aren’t they. They’ve got their phone in their hand and they’re clicking and slashing,” she said. She said she “can’t get the gist.” Gardening, weekly coffee dates with her daughters and trolling for antiques are more up her alley.
She can’t email and doesn’t understand Snapchat, but she is tech-savvy enough to look up her garage sale scores on Ebay to check out their value.
“It’s just satisfying you get an answer for something so easy. It’s amazing how it does all the work. I just wish I was younger to make the most of it,” she said.
Grandson and grandmother have been close since Eckersley was a baby, and though he’s one of five grandkids, he sheepishly says he’s the favourite.
“She means the world to me,” he said. “She goes to the ends of the earth and back, so it means a lot.”
The feeling is mutual, but grandma’s on to him.
“He’s lovely, but he makes fun of me in a way because I’m old,” she said, laughing. “He does things like that for fun, but it’s nice.”
Eckersley says his grandmother is old school and brought up to be very mannerly, something she passed on to her family. Ashworth agreed, for the most part.
“I do swear occasionally. Because I come from Liverpool and there’s certain words that you use, you don’t think of them as swear words.”
As for her new-found fame, she’s taking it in stride.
“Isn’t it funny though?” she said. “I said to myself surely there must be somebody else’s done something similar.”
It’s worth a Google.