What links a reporter and the robot apocalypse?

A journalist started a Twitter storm when she reported an industrial accident in Germany - but the huge interest wasn't about the story.

It was sparked by an inadvertent reference to a sci-fi classic. Sarah O'Connor is the employment correspondent for the Financial Times and in her own words, she normally tweets "really boring stuff about unit wage costs." On a good day, her Twitter bon mots might get a few dozen retweets.

(In the picture above, Connor v O'Connor: on the left, Linda Hamilton, who played Sarah Connor in the Terminator films; on the right, Sarah O'Connor, employment correspondent for the Financial Times).

 But then she tweeted this: "A robot has killed a worker in a VW plant in Germany". For fans of the Terminator film series, it was a coincidence too good to ignore. For those of you not already familiar: the heroine of the series, Sarah Connor, is humanity's last hope, and pursued relentlessly by Arnold Schwarzenegger's Terminator, a cyborg sent from the future. The similarity in names and the report of a human death at the hands of a machine kicked Twitter into overdrive, and soon fans flooded the journalist's feed with film references. "Exterminate exterminate!" wrote one. Another tweeted: "I knew it would come to this. I just didn't think it would be so soon! Get my 40-watt pulse rifle!" More than 1,500 tweets mentioned the journalist's name, and of course many of the most popular messages included stills of the original films.

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