CUPERTINO, California -- Apple Duct Tape had its largest order to date placed today, rescuing the troubled Cupertino company from the brink of almost certain bankruptcy, according to its founder.
"My heart leaped when I saw [Steve Jobs] come through the door," said Charlie Apple, who started the company selling duct tape out of his garage in 1976. "I knew exactly what he was after, and I knew he was gonna need lots of it!"
Jobs' initially ordered 65,000 cases of the sticky stuff from Apple when all was said and done, more than enough to ensure Apple Duct Tape will not be laying off any employees at any time in the near future.
Despite the bad economy, many Americans had sold their souls to obtain Jobs' new uPhone only to find it has a design flaw - that's best fixed with a sliver of his duct tape, according to Apple.
"It may not be pretty, but it works," he said.
The duct tape patch apparently corrects a problem with the uPhone's antenna. In a controlled test, Consumer's Report found that, if you slap a piece of Apple duct tape over the antenna connection, the phone's reception problems go away.
On July 2, Jobs posted a public letter about the uPhone, in which he suggested that the reception problems were not even real, and that it was the customers' essentially flawed approach to using phones that was causing problems in the first place.
"You're not holding it right, you nitwit," he wrote to one man who had resorted to making calls from his rooftop while lying flat on his stomach and facing West by Northwest.
Jobs suggested the illusion of reception trouble probably exists because people like this have never been shown how to hold a phone properly.
Apple said Jobs' massive order indicates that he's likely reconsidered this position - and that he's likely going to need even more tape.
As of June 26, Jobs had sold 1.7 million of the broken devices, making it by far the most successful unsuccessful product launch in history.
Consumer Reports called the uPhone "the best product on the market today that does not work, bar none."
Jobs unleashed his first fix for the apparent reception problem on an unsuspecting public last week when he angrily shoved oven mitts at startled customers in front of one uPhone outlet, suggesting they "wear these while making calls, then tell me you still don't think this is the best phone on the market!"
"Hey! This actually is kind of cool," said one woman, inspecting a particularly quaint mitt featuring rustic illustrations of celery and carrots, with little French captions in a smart cursive script.
Unlike the iMitt, Jobs said, iTape is far less obtrusive, yet still enables what remains the product's most compelling feature to date: iTape promises to enhance the uPhone call experience by allowing users to actually use the mfThing.
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