Come on, People!!!

Come on, people...is this really news??!!

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THIS KID'S A TEXT MANIAC

OMG! 14,528 MESSAGES IN A MONTH

By SUSANNAH CAHALAN

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HOLD THE PHONE! Greg Hardesty tries to pry a cellphone out of the madly typing fingers of his 13-year-old daughter, Reina. "Who are you texting, anyway? Your entire school?" he asked her recently.

PHOTOS: Text-Crazed Teen

Last updated: 10:04 am
January 12, 2009
Posted: 2:09 am
January 11, 2009

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

All he could think was "OMG!"

PHOTOS: Text-Crazed Teen

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.

Hardesty admits he himself punches in 900 messages a month - 700 more than average for his age group, according to Nielsen.

Hardesty and his ex-wife have since placed restrictions on Reina's cellphone use, ruling she cannot text after dinner.

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My 17-year-old son, Dylan, averages about 15,000 texts a month without any problem. Hell, over Christmas break, he went several thousand over that. Like the girl in the story, he will text his sister or friends when they are next to him, across the room or in another room in the house/school. It's simply, however unfortunate, his mode of communication. Plus, Dylan does all his texting between the hours of 6am (on weekdays), when he gets his phone from the kitchen counter, and about 10:30pm at night, when I make him return it to the charger. Thankfully, I do have unlimited texting, something I knew was necessary with two active, social teenagers.

So, let's get real, folks. This is not news. It's the norm.