It might be futile to take away a teenager's phone as a 15-year-old recently showed that she can find a way to tweet without one.
A Confiscated Phone
Teenage girl Dorothy, who didn't reveal her last name, got her gadgets confiscated by her mother who wanted her to be more aware of her surroundings after she had caused a fire while cooking.
"She took all my tech so I'd pay more attention to my surroundings," Dorothy explained to the Guardian in a message sent from her cousin's iPad, since all her electronic devices were still with her mother. "I felt mortified! I was worried because I've been bored all summer and Twitter passes the time for me."
Little did her mother know, the resourceful teenager from Kentucky will be able to reach her followers by hacking into ordinary smart home appliances.
Finding New Ways To Tweet
Instead of doing nothing, Dorothy decided to find other ways to reach the thousands of followers tuned in to her Ariana Grande fan account on Twitter. According to her, she was worried about losing her "mutuals," which refer to two people who agree to follow each other.
First, Dorothy tweeted using her handheld gaming console Nintendo 3DS. The tweet's source label, which indicates the device that a tweet is sent from, confirms that this specific post was sent from a Nintendo 3DS.
Dorothy's mother found out about the prank and went on to confiscate the handheld Nintendo device, sending a tweet saying the account will be shut down. However, the teenager wasn't deterred. Dorothy decided to try tweeting from the Wii U, another video game console with social media functions. This time, she sent a longer message by typing a note in Minecraft, taking a screenshot of it, and posting it as a photo with the hashtag #WiiU.
The next day, Dorothy posted another photo, telling her followers that she's looking for her phone while her mother is at work. While she was unable to find her phone, the teenager managed to get a hold of the Nintendo 3DS, which she used on Twitter for the next few days.
A Final Tweet From The Fridge
Eventually, her mother caught on and confiscated all her electronic devices again. With her gaming consoles all out of her hands, Dorothy made a last-ditch effort to get to Twitter-by talking to the family's LG smart refrigerator.
Surprisingly, she successfully fired off a final tweet using the kitchen appliance.
"My mom uses it to google recipes for baking so I just googled Twitter," Dorothy told New York Magazine, adding that her mother figured out her antics and is planning to get the fridge taken away. While it's possible to simply configure the refrigerator to be offline, she explained that her mother doesn't know how.