Bob CollinsBen Eckersley was doing his laundry at his grandmother’s house in the UK the other day when he used her computer and noticed something odd about her search technique on Google. She adds “please” or “thank you” to her search terms, the BBC reports.
Omg opened my Nan's laptop and when she's googled something she's put 'please' and 'thank you'. I can't ??? pic.twitter.com/hiy2tecBjU
— Ben (@Push10Ben) June 9, 2016
“She saw a TV show the other day but couldn’t work out from the credits when it was made, so she put the numerals into Google,” said Ben.
So he tweeted the image and social media — a place fairly unaccustomed to the concept of manners — lit up.
“I asked my nan why she used ‘please’ and ‘thank you’ and it seemed she thinks that there is someone – a physical person – at Google’s headquarters who looks after the searches.
“She thought that by being polite and using her manners, the search would be quicker.”
Sadly, grandma feels stupid now that she knows there’s not a human at the other end of Google.
“I feel a bit stupid really ’cause I did it that way,” she told CBC News. “I thought, well somebody’s put it in, so you’re thanking them.”
The young man’s post prompted others to take to social media to both delight in the naivete and poke a little fun at their own oldsters’ computer savvy.
“I’m old enough to have gone through from the war to now … I was born in 1930, and you can imagine, there’s been so much change in the world all that time … but I don’t know if it’s for the better or not,” grandma says.
Thank you for reading this far.
(h/t: Paul Tosto)
