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.
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.
Comments