A couple who helped a young man with his tie at a MARTA station says it was just "the right thing to do."
Alfred and Adelina Alberghini were interviewed at the State of MARTA address Thursday morning, where they talked about the photo of them at the Lindbergh MARTA station that went viral last year.
“I said, ‘Do you know how to do that correctly?’ And he said, ‘No ma’am,’ and I said, ‘Wait right here,’” Adelina said.
She turned to her husband and told him to go help the young man.
“I just tied his tie for him. It was just that simple and over just that quickly,” Al said.
Al says after they got on the train, he untied the tie and had the young man tie it on his own to make sure he learned how to do it.
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“I didn’t think it was anything special. I was giving the young man a hand and that’s all there was to it,” Al said.
As Al helped the man, Adelina says she noticed people nearby pulling out their phones.
“There were two young men standing on the other side and said, ‘This dude doesn't know how to tie his tie and we're gonna put it on YouTube.’ And I said, ‘No you're not. You are not gonna put it on YouTube. You are not going to hold this man up to any embarrassment. You put those phones away,’” she said.
Despite her attempts, someone from the other side snapped a photo and posted it on Facebook. The post was shared nearly 230,000 times.
“Our nephew sent us an email with this picture and said, ‘It’s official, you’re Imarnternet famous and it’s going viral.’ We had no concept of what going viral really meant until our relatives in Italy saw it, friends in Korea told us it had hit there. It had hit the UK on several websites there,” Adelina said.
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She says the one thing they never did was get the young man’s name. They think he was on his way to work somewhere at the time.
Adelina says they were shocked by all the attention and were just doing what came naturally to them.
“We were where we were supposed to be, doing what we were supposed to do,” Adelina said.
“We saw him with a problem and we could help him. It was that simple,” Al said.
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