ORCHARD PARK, N.Y. – Terrell Owens can't understand why everyone made such a big deal out of him missing the start of the Bills voluntary workout program last month."What I find so unfair is that I'm not the only guy out of 32 teams that didn't show up," Owens said Thursday. "That's what's so frustrating about the whole thing."
CHEYENNE, WYOMING — 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.
Hmm ... imagine their surprise when they were obviously busy doing something other than supervising their ... child ... when she racked up an enormous bill. So, the dad did what any reasonable dad would do - he took a hammer to the cell phone. One down, twelve billion to go.
We're turning into a society of heads-down walkers and people who would rather play with a gadget than actually talk to people who might be a hundred feet away. You've seen them, Zombie-like, walking around with their heads buried in some QWERTY keyboard, punching something in at ten cents a throw. Kids don't understand the value of money, so when dad got a bill from Verizon for five large, he went medieval on the phone and might have wanted to do the same to the kid but feared the reprisal of our legal system.
Meanwhile, since the kid's grades went from A's and B's to F's in two months of playing with the "phone." (Are they really phones?) Imagine that, will ya. Mostly, parents will complain about their kids' behavior patterns, until it impacts their finances - then they turn to the hammer. Grades, schmades - we're talking about money here.
2 comments:
Hey Anthony,
Darwin awards were given to a young woman who walked in front of a moving car in a mall parking lot while texting her boyfriend.
I guess that is right up there with women who put on mascara (and other makeup) while driving.
Hope you and Kitty have a great holiday.
I can't begin to imagine what it was like for the parents to get a $5K phone bill, especially if they thought that, like you blogged, their texting plan was disabled. 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 lower your wireless expenses down in this rough economy.
Dylan
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