<p>I think that texting is handy. All of my girls have it (unlimited, $5 per month). I don’t worry about the phone ringing in class. I have no need to talk to my daughter to let her know that I will pick her up in 15 minutes. I just want to text her and go. Then we can talk in the car later!</p>
<p>Btw, I’ll bet a lot of those texties are along the lines of “OK”, “NO”, “I’ll call later”, as opposed to long conversations.</p>
<p>kluge -</p>
<p>THIS IS IMPORTANT. Here is the explanation of how you can get gazillions of text charges. Key question: Does your daughter have IM turned on for the cell phone. IF SO, here’s the explanation: Every time the phone is turned off (or on), messages go out to everyone on the buddy list that your daughter is off (or on) line (20 “buddies” = 20 text messages going out EACH TIME). Everytime one of the buddies goes off (or on) line, your daughter gets a message.</p>
<p>I had the same problem and no one could figure it out. My son kept track and sent only 3 text messages in a month. The bill was for hundreds of messages. It took 3 months to get someone at the phone company to finally tell me how it worked.</p>
<p>DON’T USE YOUR CELL PHONES FOR IMs (unless you have an unlimited texting plan)!!!</p>
<p>–Bob</p>
<p>fendergirl, I believe it is called itap (at least on my phone).</p>
<p>it’s different from company to company, cause it was called something different from tmobile to verizon.</p>
<p>Hey kluge,</p>
<p>You crack me up.</p>
<p>LMAO it takes me about 3 hours to type a 2 line text message… Dont get those stupid phone buttons xD</p>
<p>Kluge,grmr n spell n txt!? LOL.Txt vrybig ovrCs.S2 #s worn off fone face. Jst blank buttns.CFN.Chrs.</p>
<p>D hardly ever text messages. S hits around 300 a month or so-mainly from and to girls. He said, “Well, you told me to watch my daytime minutes!”
Managing our family’s electronics requires an advanced degree. We have 4 cell phones and two Blackberrys (both mine- one personal and one work). The personal Blackberry will go away when the plan expires in Feb. the work Blackberry is also a phone, making a 5th phone. Two of the cells are on Cingular and two on TMobile. We have been quite pleased with TMobile, but the coverage isn’t as good as Cingular. We are moving H to Cingular because we have burned up too many minutes between him and me during this move. We need to be on the same network. D doesn’t expire on TMobile until 2007. I told S that he can only call ME right now because we have free Cingular to Cingular and we are running low on minutes. I get us high minute plans- we use our phones a lot. It works well for our family. We like our electronics and we are in different cities from each other a lot.</p>
<p>HAHAHA - wily phone co. (+wily talkative s) almost got us bigtime with this too. Lulled into a false sense of security by “responsible” kid pounding the internet for a free summer exchange program H and I are duly impressed when he pulls off a month abroad at no cost to him or us. When H picked his jaw up off the floor at the pone bill S tried to argue that since we paid nothing for his fantastic experience we should be happy to pay for the 10million text messages he made to GF from half way around the world. Needless to say S will be working the next 3 months to pay off his free summer exchange!</p>
<p>i know a girl who said goodnite to her bf via text (we were on the eastcoast- he was in cali- and no it was ntot my D), after many goodnites of fake nails clicking on the phone, they finally stopped</p>
<p>45 minutes later, he texts to break up…what in the world happened in those 45 minutes. cross country with no contact to cause a break up after a previous HOUR of I loves u and such</p>
<p>And breaking up via text is soooooooo classy</p>
<p>Ugh! I just opened S’s cell phone bill a couple hours ago and for the first time in over a year, he went over his text limit… by 600 texts in one month!!! So he owes me $50 now. I’m waiting for a call back from him, and I hope I find out why he texted someone 800 times (he gets 200 free with his plan). I’m thinking there’s a girl we don’t know about. And some of the texts were into the wee hours of the morning. The funny thing is that he has so many rollover minutes that he could have talked to this person for free for the entire month, without ever hanging up, and still not have been charged.</p>
<p>mom
its definitely a girl!.Same thing hapened to S and his cell phone bill a couple of months back when he “fell in love”.At first I was angry,then thought back to how his father and I used to talk all night on a regular phone (way back then) and even fall asleep with the phones still connected(I guess we had the equivalent of unlimited calling).So I switched his plan to unlimited texting,its about $5 more a month.
Texting is the new cell phone usage method.# of actual calls is way down,at least on S’s phone.Texting is more private and discrete,at least.</p>
<p>I finally gave up and just got a plan that has 1000 texts per month. I was really tired of paying .10 for every text over the limit. And the texts are often really stupid single word messages like “sup” and “nmu” and “hey”. But there is no reasoning with teenage girls! And my son is not far behind in the cell phone usage!</p>
<p>I thought that it was a joke that they even had a plan with 2500 texts per month (In addition to unlimited Verizon-to-Verizon texts.) Shows how much I know.</p>
<p>I keep asking why they don’t just CALL eachother and actually SPEAK to eachother, rather than holding the very slow text sending conversation. I think the attraction is the technology and they do it because they can. Sort of like the tedious IMing conversations via computer. It certainly isn’t very efficient and I predict that the novelty will eventually wear off. At least, I hope so! :)</p>
<p>How about this? My daughter actually wore out the contacts on her phone pad from excessive texting! :D</p>
<p>momof2inca, keep in mind that with texting, you are charged with INCOMING messages as well. When my daughter was in Russia, the last month she was there she had 3000+ text messages – it turned out that one of her friends back home had figured out how to connect AIM to text messaging, and told all the other friends… and everyone was writng her. </p>
<p>So your son might very well have a girl friend or even several good friends who keep on texting him, whether he wants to hear from them or not. </p>
<p>So before getting too angry, send him the bill and ask him what led to it. And if your service allows, check on line now to see how is usage is for the current billing period, and let him know if the problem persists.</p>
<p>Yes, that incoming charge irritates me as you have no control over it. We have unlimited Verizon to Verizon texts, but a limit on others. One girl made my son’s go way over one month. I called Verizon and you can not block an individual cellular number, but you can block domains.</p>
<p>You are not charged for an incoming text until you open it. To avoid charges, just delete text messages you are not interested in reading.</p>
<p>But you don’t know who message is from until you open? I don’t even know how to delete without opening.</p>
<p>I don’t know what service you have, but verizon charges you the second the text clears the system and is sent to you. Opening it is completely irrelevant and verizon never knows if you read them, just if you are sent them. So it doesn’t matter if you open it or not.</p>