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Trivia Quizzes

Fact-or-Fake Friday: Cell Phone Struggles

July 25, 2014

Here are three weird news items involving lost or misplaced cell phones. Well, kind of—two of them are honest-to-goodness true, and the third one we made up. Can you guess which one is the impostor? (The answer is at the end of the post.)

A.

One day in October 2013, a farmer was going about his daily business in Chickasha, Oklahoma. While he was standing over a grain elevator full of 280,000 pounds of sorghum…he dropped his cell phone in. It sunk so far down he couldn’t reach it. The grain was then shipped to a grain processing plant in another Oklahoma town, and from there it was sent via barge down the Mississippi River to Louisiana, where it set off for its final destination: Japan. In July 2014—nine months later—the farmer received a call (at home). A worker at a mill in Japan found the phone mixed in with two million bushels of sorghum. The battery was dead, but it was still in perfect working order. It was shipped back to Oklahoma, with hundreds of family photos still on the device.

B.

A woman checked in to a Tampa, Florida, emergency room with complaints of severe stomach pain. The pain was so bad that she collapsed on the sidewalk outside the hospital, having walked two miles to the facility. When asked why she hadn’t called an ambulance, the woman said that she would’ve, but couldn’t find her phone. The patient was admitted with suspected appendicitis until an X-ray revealed the source of her stomach pain: she’d swallowed her smartphone. How did she do it? She claims to “have no idea” but is glad that her expensive iPhone was retrieved and that it still worked.

C.

A man and his friend went to an amusement park in Pachuca, Mexico and visited the big cats enclosure. While observing a sleeping lion named Zeus, he dropped his phone right into the lion’s lair. The man wasn’t sure what to do, until his friend bet him that he couldn’t jump into the enclosure and retrieve the phone without being detected by the lion or park staff. He took the bet, and he would’ve won…until the phone began to ring, which startled the lion, who mauled the man.

Want more fake facts? Then check out Uncle John’s Fake Facts. (Really!)