Unblendable

If you have kids, you’ve probably heard all about www.willitblend.com. That’s the website with videos of some guy sticking all sorts of things into a blender to see what happens. Golf balls, Chuck Norris dolls and Guitar Heroes all fall victim to the blender.

On one video, he even takes a $500 iPhone and runs it through the blender. By the time he’s done, the iPhone is nothing more than black powder and chunks of metal.

He’s careful to warn viewers not to try it at home, and I assume no one would be stupid enough to stick CDs or hockey sticks or small appliances into their mom’s blender.

But in our house, we’ve done something the blender guy hasn’t even thought of. We’ve run a cell phone through a recliner.

About three weeks ago, our kids’ cell phone went missing. We looked everywhere — in the house, the car, the garage and their lockers at school. No phone. The situation got so desperate that they even voluntarily cleaned their rooms in a last-ditch attempt to find the phone.

No luck.

Then, last week, my wife made a discovery. Her reclining chair had been acting odd. The lever on the side wouldn’t go all of the way back, and the footrest wouldn’t flip up the way it normally does.

To find out what was going on, she turned the chair over. (A disclaimer: She had asked me to do it, and it was on my “to-do” list, right after I tested the chair by taking a nap in it.)

When she turned the recliner over, she found the cell phone lodged in its innards. The phone looked as though the blender guy had gotten ahold of it. The screen was smashed, and the metal case was mutilated. It was a mess.

I took it to the cell phone store where we had bought it.

After he stopped laughing, the guy said, “Hey, let’s see if it works.”

Fearing that it had been stolen, I had called the cell phone company and deactivated the account, so we wouldn’t get a $5,000 cell phone bill for calling Guam or somewhere.

After reactivating the phone, he dialed the store number and — Voila! — it worked. The camera in it didn’t work, and you couldn’t see anything on the little screen, but everything else worked just fine — except for the little pieces of plastic that kept falling out of it.

Luckily, we had a spare phone and activated it. We’ll retire the old phone.

Maybe we’ll send it to the blender guy. If our kids can’t destroy it using a recliner, he doesn’t have a chance with his wimpy little blender.