Greg Hardesty’s teenage daughter managed to send 14,528 text messages last month. When he received his 440 page AT&T wireless phone bill, he thought it was a mistake. The dad, age 45, said “First I laughed. I thought ‘That’s insane. That’s impossible.’ And I immediate whipped out the calculator to see if it was humanly possible.” He found out that it was, but just barely.Reina, his 13-yr old daughter, would’ve had to send text message at the rate of 484 per day, or one every two minutes of every waking hour. When the father asked “Who are you texting anyway? Your entire school?” She replied, “A lot of my friends have unlimited texting. I just text them pretty much all the time.”
According to the report, she routinely messages a core group of “four obsessive texters,” all girls between 12 and 13 years old on her LG phone. Reina managed to text one of her friends who was sitting right next to her at a karaoke party.
Hardesty’s AT&T phone plan included unlimited texting for $30/month. If he would’ve had to pay standard AT&T rates the bill would’ve been a whopping $2,905.60 (at $0.20 per message).
According to Nielson studies, the average 13- to 17-yr old teen texts 1,742 messages per month. Hardesty admits that he texts around 900 messages per month (30 per day), which is about 700 more than his age group.
As a result of this last month’s activity, and in an attempt to curtail her texting activity, Hardesty and his ex-wife have now told Reina she can no longer send text messages after dinner.
I don't understand what is so great about texting, anyway. I find it irksome. The buttons on the phone are too small and takes me way too long to send messages. Often it takes me 5 minutes to type a message and less than 5 seconds to lose it. I can't count the number of times I hit the big red button that canceled and deleted the message, pissed me off and I ended up throwing the phone across the room.
