Slashdot Mirror
Girl Sends 14,528 Text Messages In One Month
Greg Hardesty, 45, from Silverado Canyon, California was a little shocked when he received his phone bill last month. It's not everyday that you get a 440-page cell phone bill. His 13-year-old daughter Reina had sent an incredible 14,528 text messages in one month. Hardesty says, "First, I laughed. I thought, 'That's insane, that's impossible...And I immediately whipped out the calculator to see if it was humanly possible." If you crunch the numbers it comes out to be 484 a day or one for every two minutes she was awake, impressive!
So she's a lightweight user of txting :-)
HEAVY use would be sending more than 2 a minute.
Close, but no cigar!
She'll end up with CTS.
Seriously though how does she manage that? Surely her school won't allow her to be texting every 2 minutes!
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
I'm sorry, off topic, but . . . this is Idle, and the quote at the bottom currently says "If you have nothing to do, don't do it here." That's just too funny. I know, I know, randomly generated for the whole site and not selective for which section, but still . . . funny.
I'm not very into mobile phones so correct if I'm wrong, but isn't the limit for a SMS message 160 characters? Now if you send a text message longer than that, it actually sends several text messages and thus is counted as several messages on the service provider side, even though it looks like one message on the modern mobile phones.
Now, filling 160 characters is not hard. With an average word length of 5.1 in English that would mean around 30 words per SMS when including whitespace. Even this post, that would be counted as not that long by Slashdot standards, would make up 7 SMS messages giving a count seven times larger than it actually is. Now imagine that you combine this with lots of short messages like "OK" you could easily get a large number of SMS messages even though your communication has really not been that intensive.
Does this explain the bizarre amount of messages this girl has sent? No. Is there a possibility that she has "broadcasted" her messages to all her friends for instance? That would explain a lot.
I demand the Cone of Silence!
If a spammer were to send her 100 messages, that would count as 100 SMS text messages. So, maybe she signed up to a bunch of forums where messages were SMS'd to her by spammers.
How does the bill get to 440 pages? Does the phone company detail every message?
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
no friggen way
when did she do anything but text people
this is just not possible
some one should be looking in to this fraud
some one at the Tel Co belongs in jail
who else has this Tel Co riped off this way
IF your going to rip people off with a computer
have the since to filter extreme cases
that would make your fraud stand out
The number includes all the texts she received as well.