Farmer loses cellphone in grain pile, it survives 7,000-mile journey to Japan

Many of us have lost our cellphones, never to see them again, but not this Oklahoma farmer.

Kevin Whitney was working on his farm last October when he bent over and dropped his iPhone4 into a grain elevator.

(Image via KFOR-V News)

After losing his phone into a silo holding about 290,000 bushels of grain, Whitney assumed he’d never see it again so he went out and bought another phone the next day, still saddened by the thought of losing important memories that his original phone held.

This is when the fun began for his iPhone.

After Whitney dropped it in the grain, the phone traveled to another Oklahoma grain facility then went down the Arkansas and Mississippi rivers to a depot in Louisiana. From there, the grain was loaded onto ships bound for another grain depot in Japan.

This past May, Whitney received a phone call from that depot in Louisiana and discovered that someone at a feed mill in Japan found his phone. The company in Japan sent it back to the depot in the U.S. and a man there charged the phone to find out who it belonged to.
 
So Whitney got his phone back in near-mint condition after taking a journey around the world, and it looked even better than some of our phones.

Who knows if the case contributed to its safe return, but Whitney’s phone was sporting a $34.95 black “CandyShell” Speck case (which of course the company believes contributed to its safety).

Speck Candyshell case.

And yet some of us have a hard enough time keeping our phones intact during the ordinary day-to-day hustle and bustle.