CHEYENNE — In one month, a Cheyenne teenager sent 10,000 text messages and received about the same — all while her family's plan did not include texting.
That means the family's provider — Verizon — charged them for each incoming and outgoing text message.
The girl's parents, Gregg and Jaylene Christoffersen, thought texting had been disabled, so one can imagine their surprise when they got the monthly phone bill and it asked for $4,756.25.
4,756 = 11:11, like this: 4+7=11, 5+6=11
The look on the dad's face is priceless... Looks like the ChristOffersens made an offering to Christ by smashing the phone into pieces with a hammer, probably saying "you're next if you screw up again" to the kid.
Since she lost her phone, Dena's grades have gone up, and the texting is down to zero.
No, really?
1 comment:
Nice blog. I can't begin to imagine what it was like for the parents to get a $5K phone bill, especially if they thought that they had a texting plan that, while not unlimited, was at least comprehensive. Talk about shock! Without debating the appropriateness of the volume of the rampant texting, I get particularly riled when parents are stuck with huge bills; I hear about this all the time because I work for the consumer advocacy website http://www.fixmycellbill.com, powered by a company called Validas, where we slash the average cell bill by 22 percent. People like the Christoffersons may not have been actively misled by their providers, but they were clearly unaware of the vulnerability of their cell plans to their kids’ texting habits. I could go on and on about how shifty these cell companies can be in their attempts to make you overpay. I'll mention that at Validas, we stop them and have currently put over $5,000,000 back in the pockets of consumers. You can check out Validas’s fixmycellbill.com in the national news media, most recently on Good Morning America at http://www.abcnews.go.com/GMA/story?id=6887412&page=1.
Good luck to everyone trying to cut your wireless expenses in this rough economy.
Dylan
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