Olive Horrell isn’t your typical 97-year-old. When offered a wish by the Senior Wish of a Lifetime foundation, Olive didn’t want to meet a celebrity, ride a hot air balloon or drive a NASCAR, instead she wanted to see the future. So, she opted for a VIP tour of Google’s Mountain View campus where she proceeded to have her mind blown.
Technology holds a very special place in Olive’s heart, for not only did she come of age without indoor plumbing and electricity in rural Montana, but her father was an engineer, and she aspired to follow in his footsteps until and also create life-changing technology. Unfortunately, the earlier part of the 20th century was not as inclusive of females in STEM, and her father discouraged her that “they’d never hire a woman.”
For Olive, who prides herself a “lifelong lover of technology,” Google symbolizes the pinnacle of all the “wonderful tech stuff that comes out.”
So how did she spent the day at the HQ of one of American’s most advanced tech companies? Why by dabbling with fun tech demos of course. Olive took a ride in Google’s self-driving cars, a feat she found more a novelty compared to the Google Photos’ ability to identify the same individual within pictures separated by more than a decade.
“Push a button and you have history right in front of you,” she said. “This is very mind-boggling for me.”
Adhering to the unwritten law of grandmothers and virtual reality, Olive donned Google’s makeshift Cardboard VR headset and was left as speechless as the grandmother who tested an oculus last year. She was even given a chance to draw her own rendition of the Google logo using the Doodle software and a stylus on a touchscreen computer.
After touring the remaining campus and catching sight of a volleyball court, a mobile pizza oven, and a handful of the 22 on-campus kitchens, Olive conclude that at Google, “you don’t have to grow up.”
For the tech company itself, this situation presented an opportunity to see modern technology through a fresh, unbiased set of eyes. And so, concluded Olive’s foray as Google engineer for a day.
Source: money.cnn
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