Text addiction doesn’t begin to describe the problem 13-year-old Reina Hardesty suffers from.
The California teen recently racked up an astonishing 14,528 text messages in ONE month, producing an AT&T billing statement that totaled 440 pages.
Can your kid top that?
AT&T billing managers say the feat is almost incomprehensible. If you do the math you’d find that Reina texted 484 text messages a day, or one every two minutes of every waking hour.
It doesn’t seem humanly possible, but according to the text happy teen, she was able to do so with the help of her four obsessive texting friends between the ages of 12 and 13 during their winter break from school.
What would you do if your kid made the news for her insane addiction to texting?
Greg Hardesty, Reina’s dad, simply smiled.
Seriously.
The California dad says he was initially shocked by the statement (he told news reporters he thought AT&T made a mistake), but after speaking with his daughter (who claimed she was “bored” during winter break and used texting to pass the time) he “laughed” at the situation.
Dude must have some sense of humor.
Perhaps, Greg’s laugh was one of relief since (thankfully) he has a phone plan that allows unlimited texting for $30 a month. If he didn’t, the good natured single dad estimates, he would have owed AT&T $2,905.60 at a rate of 20 cents per message.
According to a Nielsen study of cellphone usage, the average number of monthly texts for a 13-to 17-year-old teen is 1,742.
To rack up more than 14,000 text messages in four weeks time Reina says she never let go of her phone. In fact, the teen admits that she had a karaoke birthday party, and while other people were singing, she was texting her best friend, who was sitting right next to her.
But, that’s not all, the teen even admits to texting her friends to brag about the exorbitant number of text messages she had logged after her dad got the statement.
As for Greg Hardesty, he says he can’t be too hard on his daughter because he punches in 900 messages a month – 700 more than average for his age group, according to Nielsen.
As for preventing Reina from breaking her own record, Greg and his ex-wife have since placed restrictions on their daughter’s cellphone usage.
Get this… even after their child almost lost feeling in her digits, instead of yanking her phone, they have decided on another punishment: No texting after dinner.
Good luck with that.
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