"The bale you have called is currently switched off or outside the coverage area, please call again later"

Ruapehu Bulletin, Volume 14, Issue 672, 4 February 1997, Page 12

"The bale you have called is currently switched off or outside the coverage area, please call again later"

Cell-phones used to be the badge of Auckland yuppies, but now anybody can have them, even Waimarino cows or sheep soon! A well-known and (usually) proud hay contractor, who of course shall remain nameless, went to mow, went to mow a meadow recently. However, instead of mowing the customer's paddock, he mowed the neighbour's! That's not the real story though. Our man had a machinery breakdown and while fixing the machine, got a call on his cell-phone. After chatting for a while and promising to pick up a loaf of bread on the way home, he finishing fixing the machine and carried on mowing. Bad news when he finished the paddock though — no cell-phone! It seems somewhere in that paddock, inside one of those rather large round bales, is our once-proud haymaker's mobile telephone! So, you may see someone standing with his ear to a hay bale, or sometime in the winter, keep an eye out — you might see a cattle beast lowing to its 'stock broker' in Auckland, having chomped its way through the hay!