Good manners never fail—even on automated search engines.
On June 9, an 86-year-old UK woman named May Ashworth typed a simple Google query:
“Please translate these roman numerals mcmxcviii thank you.”
The polite request quickly went viral, after Ashworth’s 25-year-old grandson Ben Jonson tweeted a picture of her laptop screen.
Charmed by her internet manners, Twitter users have shared Jonson’s tweet over 31,000 times as of writing. Jonson later told the BBC that his grandmother thought a human might be responding to requests on the search engine.
Google gave Ashworth what she was looking for within a fraction of a second: MCMXCVIII is 1998. But six days later, a special human-generated message arrived for her too.