Dear Brother,
Happy Birthday! I sent you a birthday card in the mail. When it arrives, you might have to pay the post office 2 cents because all I had on hand were the old 39 cent stamps. I promise you though, if you can dig 2 cents out of your sofa cushions, and fork it over to the post maser, it will totally be worth it because the card is HILARIOUS! Hallmark’s got some funny people working for them.
I was going to call you and wish you a Happy Birthday in person, until I remembered your phone isn’t working. When are you going to get that fixed, anyway? The ½ marathon we ran together was back in April, for goodness sake. That race was a lot of fun wasn’t it?
It was really unfortunate though, what happened to your cell phone during the race. I mean, who would have thought that when you put your cell phone in your jacket pocket, and you put that banana in the same pocket with the phone, that so much trouble would come of it all?
Looking back, I guess you realize now that it wasn’t wise to tie your jacket around your waist when the temperatures started to rise. Doing so meant that the jacket pockets, instead of being in a normal pocket position, were left hanging down near your calves. I guess on a normal afternoon it might have been fine, but with all that running, it caused the jacket to swing and the pocket with the phone and the banana in it to bang against your calf reapeatedly. REPEATEDLY! Which caused the banana to smack into your cell phone over and over and over again. AND OVER AGAIN. For 13.1 miles!
Did you know that elite runners take on average 180 steps per minute when they are running? It was rather obvious after seeing your finishing time that you aren’t an elite runner. So maybe you took an average of 160 steps per minute during the race. Divided by 2, (because we’re only going to count one leg in this) that means the pocket was hitting your calf, and the banana inside the pocket, was smashing into your cell phone roughly 80 or so times a minute. Multiply that by the 171 minutes it took you to complete the race, and you have a recipe for cell phone disaster! I mean, that was bound to tear open the banana peel, smash the banana to a pulp, and grind it into all the cracks and crevices on your phone. Well, of course you know that now, don’t you?
Are you still picking out bits of banana from around the buttons on your phone? And how about the USB port? I know you said for a while there that the port was so full of banana that it actually thought the phone was connected to the computer. I actually thought that was kind of funny. In fact, I think the only way you could have ended up with MORE banana smashed into your phone would have been if we had baked it into a banana cream pie.
The bobby pin I gave you was too fat to fit into the teeny crevices on your phone. Did you try a sewing needle like mom suggested? You might be able to pick out more of the banana with one of those. Just be careful not to prick your finger with it. I’m sure you don’t want drops of blood mixed in with all that banana mess. Do you?
I tried, just on the off chance that it might work, actually calling you from a real banana, but Chiquita doesn’t have enough cell phone towers in my area. They may have more down your way.
Well, if you haven’t fixed your phone yet, you might consider getting a landline for your house. Or, if you continue to insist on ONLY having a cell phone, you might buy one of those new iPhones. I haven’t seen one up close and personal yet, but I did read a story about a test somebody did. They put a set of keys and an iPhone in the same pocket and walked around all day. The glass on the iPhone didn’t even get scratched. And from what I can tell from the photos I’ve seen, the iPhone doesn’t appear to have any buttons, so that would be far less crevices to pick banana out of should you ever make such a dumb mistake again. In fact, you might be able to just WIPE the banana off the phone, in one swipe. Failing that, the key test I mentioned at least suggests you could scrape the banana off with a knife or something, and the glass would probably still be okay.
The only downfall I see, should you get an iPhone, is that you’d have to change over to AT&T. Chiquita’s calling network, as far as I know, doesn’t support iPhones.
Happy Birthday from Your loving sister,
Belle
P.S. It’s my friend Russ’s birthday today too!
Running With Books 