14 DAY TRIAL // “Not all those who wander are lost,” J. R. R. Tolkien writes in “The Lord of the Rings,” and, as surprising as this may sound, it looks like this line can also apply to smartphones. Or at least to one very special such gadget, that is.
Thus, word has it that a farmer in the United States and his beloved smartphone were reunited not too long ago, after going as long as 8 months without seeing each other or at least chatting on Skype.
During this time, the gadget traveled all the way to Japan, and even made a bunch of new friends who helped it get back to his country and into its owner's loving arms, Sky News informs.
Long story short, it was back in April that 53-year-old Kevin Whitney from Oklahoma, who is a farmer, dropped his smartphone into a large silo he was unloading. More precisely, the iPhone simply fell out of his shirt pocket.
At that time, the man failed to notice that he had dropped his phone, and carried on with his work. It was only later that he figured out what had happened. By then, too much time had passed for the farmer to even dream about recovering his phone.
Hence, 53-year-old Kevin Whitney simply got himself a new phone, and soon enough forgot all about his lost gadget. Little did he know that, in just a few months, his iPhone would pull a Lassie and return home to its rightful owner.
Information shared with the public says that, after being separated from the American farmer, the smartphone traveled all the way to the island of Hokkaido in Japan. Here, it was found by a worker, who sent it back to Eric Slater, the manager of Zen-Noh Grain Corporation's terminal in Louisiana.
Eric Slater charged the phone, and then took a sneak peek at the photos stored on it. He thus managed to figure out who the gadget's rightful owner was and contacted Kevin Whitney. Fast forward a few days, and the American farmer and his gadget were back together.
“Lo and behold, I get a call from a guy who works with this grain company in Convent, Louisiana, saying a guy at a feed mill in Japan found the phone,” Kevin Whitney tells the press in a recent interview.
When asked to comment on this incident, Eric Slater explains that, although this might be difficult to believe, he was quite used to finding phones in grains. In fact, the man claims that, thanks to people's negligence, workers at the facility he runs find about one gadget per month in the grains they load and unload.