The Tyranny of Texting

The Tyranny of Texting

If you're a parent of a teenager, you know exactly what I mean by the “tyranny” of texting. For this generation of kids over ten, actually using a cell phone to make a telephone call is “soooo yesterday.” They're not going to risk parents overhearing their conversations, even if they're holding them outside in sub-freezing weather.

No, this generation's teens prefers to hold their cell phones slightly to the right and down of the parental gaze as they are 1) allegedly doing homework on the computer 2) allegedly telling you about their day in the car; or 3) allegedly doing anything but what they're really doing---which is: TEXTING ALL THE TIME!

The term strikes terror in the hearts of parents who have received the cell phone bill and wondered what in the name of Jehosephat could possibly have increased their bill by hundreds or even thousands of dollars.

As one of that number, I can tell you that if you thought you had exhausted every reason to HATE your cell phone company, you just found another reason for ire.

Text messages cost telecommunication companies far less than conventional phone calls. Yet they have been delighted to find that they can rake in profits at both ends of the texting exchange, first by charging the sender for the negligible cost of sending the message, and secondly by charging the recipient for the dubious distinction of receiving the scintillating message: “Wassup?” For this both parties have their parents' cell phone bills charged anywhere from ten cents and up.

This may sound like a minor charge, but when you consider that many teens can send at least one hundred of these earth-shattering communications per hour, you have the situation of at least one shell-shocked parent who found that the monthly cell phone bill had gone up by $1,000 in a single billing period.

The solution that telecommunication companies offer to this texting frenzy(one might term it “blackmail”) is to tell parents that they can charge them a mere $15.00 per month or so for the privileging of having their teens risk repetitive stress injuries by using their thumbs to send thousands of messages per month.

In my case, the $150 of extra charges is being worked off by yard work and a decreased monthly allowance until every charge is paid off. Future texting is the financial burden of the teen sending said texts, but that doesn't change my outrage that telecommunication companies have found yet way to exploit a future generation of consumers and their patsy parents. In retaliation, I have to tell them that if they think of texting as “training wheels” for future consumers to use even more expensive options like ring tones, email, and video, they are just keeping this bill-payer from trying any service they offer and imagining them in the deepest circles of Dante's Inferno, just above Sowers of Discord, Falsifiers, and HMO's.