I am a pre-menopausal mother of five... two teenaged daughters, and three older sons, one of whom just completed his second tour in Iraq. I have literally changed thousands of diapers in my years as a mother and more recently as a grandmother. I dream... nay, I live for the day when the proverbial reversal of roles kick in and my kids have the pleasure of changing my diapers.
“TALK IS CHEAP” (not!)
Who ever came up with that silly little saying obviously didn’t have teenagers with cell phones.
My current cell phone bill is $716.57. I thought I was getting a new telephone directory in the mail but nope, it was just the phone bill. My 5 phone family plan comes with 1600 anytime minutes. Those minutes were used up during the first week of the cycle. The rest were 35 cents each. That’s almost as bad as phone sex. Thank goodness past phone bill books led me to signing up for unlimited text messaging or the bill would have been heavier… higher. My 14 year old had almost 6000 (no, that’s not a typo) messages sent and received. 6000! Plus she talked for 5636 total minutes. 5636 minutes… that’s almost 94 hours. Heck, telemarketers don’t even spend that much time on the phone during a two week period, and they get paid by the hour!
To be fair, my youngest daughter wasn’t the only one racking up charges on the phone. My son who visited us just before Christmas had my phone during his stay and added up some pretty impressive numbers himself, but being as he had just returned from over seas and had a bunch of friends wanting to hear from him we were a little more understanding.
I didn’t confiscate any phones but I have limited the amount of time the kids can spend on them. The house phone is to be used when ever possible for local calling. In the mean time my youngest will be working her butt off for me to work off her debt!
Maybe she should consider a career in telemarketing…
Hi Jody! I only have one teenager, but yer preachin’ to the choir! He texted ~3,000 times last month, and uses up over 90% of the minutes on our SHARED plan– What exactly is all that texting consist of? “Where U @?” “CUL8R” and “LOL”? His thumbs are the size of rutabagas!
Comment by Dani — January 13, 2009 @ 10:34 pm