I spotted this on The Register and thought it was an entertaining piece simply because of how mind boggling it is. Reina, the 13 year old daughter of Greg Hardesty of the Orange County Register clocked in a staggering 14,528 SMS text messaged between November 27th and December 26th of 2008. By my math, this works out to be 484.27 texts per day, or 30 per hour assuming she actually sleeps for 8hrs a day. Her 22 year old sister clocked in 7,101 messages sent (236.7 per day) during the same period while another sister had a "modest" 700 (23.3 per day). According to Hardesty, the family mobile bill was 23 pages long, with the unabbridged online PDF version sitting at 440 pages. The cost of Reina's messages alone was $2,905.60. According to provider AT&T, this was not a record but is still "a bit high". A Nielson survey found that teens between the ages of 13 and 17 send on average 1,742 texts a month. Most users send 357 on average. A certain blogger sends zero SMS messages on average.
Lets do some more math on Reina's texting. Assume that the average 8.5x11'' sheet of paper contains 500 words per page with standard margins. Assume the average text message is five words long. This is approximatley equivilant to 145 and a quarter pages worth of writing. My average university term papers were 10 pages long, and that was a struggle Essentially, she's written more in a month a university under graduate writes in a year. That is truly staggering. In all fairness, the 14,500 does include both outgoing AND incoming messages. (Yes, I'm being sensational, but unlike what some readers think, I can post whatever I damn well want.) Even still, it's a lot.

I've never really understood the texting craze to begin with. If I want to get a hold of someone, I usually fire off an email or use chat services like Facebook. Similar yes, but it doesn't cost me anything to send those messages, and it's a heck of a lot easier to type using my computer than it is on my phone. My phone package includes 50 "free" texts per month but I never use it. It just seems like an awkward way of trying to communicate when you could just phone them. It makes me feel really old saying all this. It's certainly is the new trend. I guess we should have just stuck with beepers since it appears the phone part of cell phones is now superfulous. As for the Hardesty case, I just feel sorry for whoever has to fork out the $2900 for this bill. I don't think I've ever spent that on anything. At least not all at once. As for Reina, she really needs to get a hobby, and a life outside of her phone.

Source: El Reg