Girl, 13, Sends 14,000+ Texts in One Month
by Arjun Sharma
I’m the first person to admit that I text a lot. I mean, with the iPhone unlimited text plan, I’ll have entire conversations via text, and I’ve gotten comfortable sending 1-letter texts too (like ‘K’).
But this is ridiculous. A 13 year old girl sent and received 14,528 texts between November 27th and December 26th, according to KTLA. The 440-page bill from AT&T would have cost her father over $2,900 if he hadn’t (wisely) chosen the unlimited texting plan.
The most interesting part, which CNN didn’t report (although they did bother to calculate that the girl sent an average of one text per two minutes awake), is that the entire family is text crazy. Her father sent 900 texts over the same period, which blows away his age demographic average of about 200. One of her sisters, age 22, sent 7,100 texts over that same period of time. In fact, combined this family sent over 23,000 text messages over that one month period.
Boggles your mind a bit, doesn’t it?
January 24th, 2009 at 3:29 am
I don’t think it’s really that bad, considering the amount of communication that goes on online. I’d probably be amazed to if I monitored my average bandwidth usage for a month, given that my laptop follows me everywhere at a university where a 500KB/sec download can be called slow.
The volume of text being transmitted only seems absurd in context of the ridiculous cost/byte originally imposed on texting by phone companies. With unlimited texting, this isn’t really any worse than IM, and it’s easy to be sending more than one message for every two waking minutes in that medium.