TORONTO – What does a Financial Times reporter have in common with the robot apocalypse? Not much other than her name, evidently.
On Wednesday, London-based employment reporter Sarah O’Connor tweeted a link to a story about a robot killing a contractor at one of Volkswagen’s production plants in Germany.
The story had been making headlines all over the world – the 22-year-old contractor was part of a team that was setting up the stationary robot when it grabbed and crushed him against a metal plate.
But what O’Connor didn’t realize is that her name is almost identical to the heroine in the Terminator movie, Sarah Connor, sparking a viral Twitter storm.
In case you aren’t familiar with the Terminator series, Connor – who is being hunted by the terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger) – is considered humanity’s last hope against the robots.
But O’Connor – who isn’t up to date on her Terminator knowledge – soon took to her account to clarify that she isn’t the leader of the robot revolution and that she usually only tweets about financial news.
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She also noted that the story itself isn’t that funny, adding, “Feeling really uncomfortable about this inadvertent Twitter thing I seem to have kicked off. Somebody died. Let’s not forget.”
A Volkswagen spokesperson said initial conclusions indicate that human error was to blame for the incident, rather than a problem with the robot, which can be programmed to perform various tasks in the assembly process.
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