Each day the pig would head for the apple tree and clean up whatever had fallen, but as you can imagine, he soon was wanting to eat more apples than were on the ground. Pigs have a tough time tilting their heads back so that wasn't much of an option, and he was darn near going hungry until he figured out how to get up on his hind legs, thus extending his reach as well as his lunch.
That went on for a while until the new supply was depleted, and the farmer decided he could help - by lifting the pig up to reach higher. A neighbor saw this going on one day as he came to the road to gather his mail, and, not wanting to be too obviously nosy, just made it a point to look for the farmer to be getting his mail on another day . . . and then headed to the mailbox again.
Casually, he mentioned having noticed the farmer holding the pig up, and asked why. "Well, you know, the pig likes apples, they're a healthy food, and I'm just helping him out."
"But doesn't that take a lot of time?" the neighbor asked.
"Time? What's time to a pig?" he answered.
Proving once again that it's all a matter of perspective. Dan Sorenson, the Norwegian Lutheran from Iowa, first heard the story on WCCO, that Minnesota mainstay radio station you may have listened to as a kid, or may listen to today. It seemed the St Paul School System was too often sending out requests to their staff to complete one or another task, and hearing those requests from Central led him to use the phrase from time to time.
Hearing it from him so often, a daughter needle pointed a picture of a pig with the saying below it. Sorenson hung the needlepoint in his counselor's office, and every so often someone would ask what it meant, so Sorenson would share the story. Sooner or later that person would stop back, point at the sign, nod his head, and go away chuckling.
They got the point.
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