Luckily for most of us, though, our bad days aren’t recorded and uploaded to social media platforms like Facebook and YouTube for the rest of the world to see. Unfortunately, a young woman in Hong Kong was caught having a meltdown on the subway when her phone suddenly died.
Most people with smartphones can relate to the feeling of dread when your phone is about to die.
The original video was uploaded to Facebook by Akira Chan — and it already has more than 1.1. million views. As you can see in the video, the woman sits on her phone several times, stomps her feet in frustration, and continues to cry uncontrollably. While we’re not sure exactly what happened during the course of her day, we can clearly see she was upset when her phone died.
Although it may sound silly to cry over a dead phone battery, most people with smartphones can probably relate to the feeling of dread that you get when your phone is about to die.
According to a new Gallup poll released last week, U.S. smartphone owners check their devices more than several times an hour, 11 percent check it every few minutes, and 41 percent check it a few times per hour. Researchers also suggest that if you get anxious when you misplace your cell phone or your phone battery dies, it’s called nomophobia.
Caglar Yildirim, a doctoral student in Iowa State’s Human Computer Interaction program did the research earlier this year to understand how smartphone separation anxiety affects people. Yildirim told the Huffington Post that women may even be more prone to nomophobia.
“There can be some underlying psychological mechanisms that play a role in females’ proclivity to nomophobia,” she said, adding that scientists are still doing more research on the subject.
While you may find it challenging not to laugh at the woman in the video, smartphone addiction and the anxiety that it can cause are real enough for some people.
