Who here text messages ??

Greg Hardesty didn't LOL when he got his teen daughter's cellphone statement.

All he could think was "OMG!"

The California man's 13-year-old daughter, Reina, racked up an astonishing 14,528 text messages in one month. The online AT&T statement ran 440 pages.

"First, I laughed. I thought, 'That's insane, that's impossible,' " the 45-year-old dad said. "And I immediately whipped out the calculator to see if it was humanly possible."

He found it was - barely.

It works out to 484 text messages a day, or one every two minutes of every waking hour.

"Then I thought maybe AT&T made some mistake on the bill," said Hardesty, of Silverado Canyon.

The reporter for the Orange County Register grilled his daughter on her texting habit - by text message, of course.

"Who are you texting, anyway? Your entire school?" he asked.

"Well, a lot of my friends have unlimited texting. I just text them pretty much all the time," she explained.

She messages a core of "four obsessive texters" - all girls between the ages of 12 and 13 - on her LG phone.

Reina had a karaoke birthday party, and while other people were singing, she was texting her best friend sitting right next to her.

She even texted her friends to brag about the high number of text messages she had logged when her parents got the statement.

Her texting soared last month because "it was winter break and I was bored," Reina told her parents.

Luckily, Hardesty has a phone plan that allows unlimited texting for $30 a month. Otherwise, he estimates, he would have owed AT&T $2,905.60 at a rate of 20 cents per message.

The average number of monthly texts for a 13- to 17-year-old teen is 1,742, according to a Nielsen study of cellphone usage.


Mind you, she's 13 !!!!



Dad's a fruit loop.

I do sometimes but not much. Chris text messages me a lot and I tell him to call me. It's too damn hard typing on that tiny keyboard.

I don't do text messaging at all. I had them turn that feature off on my new phone. It has a camera but I don't have the ability to do anything with the pictures once I take it

I do, and I like it, because I can get simple questions answered without having to call people. Lord, after work, I hate talking on the phone.

I get them now and then

I hate them though
Usually they are mistakes LOL meant for someone else.


My 13 yr old niece texts like there is no tomorrow.


Mable--can you take a pic then email it to yourself? That is how I do with my camera on my phone.



get this--My brother and I got Caller ID on my parents phone cus they forget if someone called or accidently hang up the phone (or forget to hang it up)..anyhow, it has been there for a week today and neither of them has noticed it...*sigh..

I'm ignorant doncha know? Don't need it, don't wanna learn it. I will text Pamela from my pc to her phone....that's enough.

I didn't know you could text from computer to phone. Gawd I know nothing.

Shelia wrote:

I didn't know you could text from computer to phone. Gawd I know nothing.

She doesn't have internet and I noticed that her IM kept showing that she was online...turns out she set her phone to receive IM messages and it will post in the form of a text. Just like Instant Messaging...pretty cool!

Yeah it is.

I don't have a cellphone so I'm in the dark about a lot of stuff.

I don't even IM anyone. I feel so left out.