It’s the typical story: Boy loves iPhone, boy loses iPhone, stranger finds iPhone, boy and iPhone are reunited once more… Except that the iPhone was lost in a grain silo in Oklahoma, and it was recovered in Japan!
Kevin Whitney loved his iPhone. Or at least he loved the countless, priceless family photos stored on it. So when the phone slipped out of his pocket and into 140 tons of grain on his farm in Oklahoma, he was understandably distraught. Luckily, people are nice in Japan.
“I had it in my pocket and I bent over to work on a copper bottom door and it fell out of my pocket into my grain pit and went up the elevator,” said Whitney.
Nine months after Whiney’s loss, he received a call from a stranger, asking if he’d lost his iPhone. Whitney replied that he had, gave the man on the other end his address, and a few days later, was reunited with his device. This type of story normally wouldn’t make the news, excepting for one small detail. The phone call from the kind stranger was placed from Japan.
Whitney’s iPhone had made the trip, along with two million bushels of sorghum, from his home town of Chickasha, Oklahoma, all the way to Kashima, Japan.
“From Chickasha it was driven by truck to another grain facility in Inola, Oklahoma. Then it traveled along the Arkansas River. From there, it sailed down the Mississippi River by barge to Convent, Louisiana. Finally, the iPhone made its way to Kashima, Japan by ship.”
(You can see the circuitous route the shipment took in the animation above.)
Amazingly enough, when Whitney got his iPhone back, there wasn’t a scratch on it, and all those precious family photos were still there.
While this story had a happy ending, most lost iPhone stories don’t end in the same way. The moral to this story, (besides that sorghum apparently makes excellent packing material), is to backup your iPhone, and enable Find My iPhone on your device. Although I’m fairly certain I’d think Apple Maps was on the fritz again if Find My iPhone indicated my device was in Japan…
Watch the KFOR TV news segment about Whitney’s lost iPhone here.
