Admittedly, many of us can’t even begin to imagine life without a smartphone. We always want to stay connected to the internet and each other, and battery life is one of the things we have to worry about during the day.
When actress Angel Giuffria was attending the popular SXSW Conference in Texas, she received one of those terrifying ‘battery low’ warnings. However, it wasn’t for her smartphone, it was for her bionic arm.
The woman was born with only one arm and is known as the ‘bionic actress’. You might have seen her play a role in ‘The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1’, and she’s been busy with other acting projects ever since.
She received a very advanced prosthetic at a young age, she was just 4 months and 10 days old when doctors equipped her with a robotic arm. A prosthetic is what the woman has known for her entire life and she’s proud of her bionic limb. In fact, she loves being called a cyborg and doesn’t think she has a disability at all. Instead, the term she’d rather use is ‘enhanced’.
Unfortunately, those bionic enhancements do need some juice to operate, and her bionic arm ran out of power in the middle of the convention.
She didn’t think it’d be a huge problem since this popular convention has plenty of charging stations available for people who want to charge their phones and other equipment.
When Angel asked someone if they pull out their phone charger for a bit so that she could charge her arm, they always refused.
They simply couldn’t believe that Angel’s bionic arm was real!
“I pulled my charger out of my purse to walk over to the wall outlet,” the actress said to Chron. “Another person walked up at the same time that I did to plug in their phone, which is fine.
“I wasn’t sure how many outlets were there, so I asked if there was room for me to charge my arm and they said no, and directed me to the back of the room,” she added. “They could’ve thought my arm was a prop.”
The woman posted a couple of tweets about her funny encounters at the popular conference/festival. Many simply believed that her arm was a part of a costume and that she was portraying a video game character.
“Y’all, I’m not mad at them!” she posted on Twitter. “I thought it was funny (because there was another plug nearby.) For all I know, they were confused by the entire situation since everyone here at #SXSW seems to think my arm is a video game fashion statement or fancy lit up glove, not a prosthesis.”
Luckily, the woman did manage to find a charging socket in the back of a room so she could operate her arm again.
“People’s phones are incredibly important to them these days and I thought this emphasized that,” she concluded.
Angel’s post quickly went viral. She was trending on Twitter for a while under the hashtag #CyborgProblems and even made the front page of popular website Reddit as well.
“I’m sorry there are inconsiderate people like that out in the world. Your attitude about it is admirable,” Jaime James commented.
“It never crossed my mind that newer prosthetics required a recharge until this post. I’m amazed and jealous of your sweet arm. Glad you found a free outlet!” another Twitter reader posted.
Luckily, everything worked out great in the end and Angel thinks the whole thing was remarkably funny. With her tweets, she also managed to gather a lot of attention for bionic limbs and tons of people have asked her interesting questions about her arm since.
Please SHARE this with your friends and family.
#CyborgProblems🤖 FYI: People at this @SXSW panel refused to give up charging their phones so I could charge my arm 🙃✨ but I found an outlet in the back of the room so CHARGE ME UP. pic.twitter.com/RYosq8MwN2
— Angel Giuffria 🦾 (@aannggeellll) March 10, 2018
