Friends Break Texting Record; 1 Gets $26,000 Bill

[Prrkitty]

http://www.wgal.com/money/19238949/detail.html

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Quote: But what isn't so funny was Andes’ bill -- he came home one day to find a box on his doorstep.

When he opened it up, thousands of pages of all the text messages and the total amount was more than $26,000.
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The one that got the bill supposedly had unlimited text messaging. So the phone company *wastes* trees just so they can print out each and EVERY one of the text messages - to prove the bill?

Stupidity comes in many shapes and forms...

[jerome]

I heard of another story where two girls in high school had texted a lot to one another. One dad got a $10k bill for it. I think the state said "Sir, you can beat her all you want, just don't kill her." Or maybe that's what should've been said.

That's funny that T-Mobile still has limits on their "unlimited" texting. I'm wondering why T-Mobile, if they knew that they have limits set, that they didn't just stop them from going through? It's not like they let the customer know how many texts he was limited to on the unlimited plan. And wouldn't a CD/DVD make more sense on listing that many texts? What a bunch of boneheads.

[rock_nog]

In normal circumstances, the limits are used as a way to make money - you go over your limit, and you get charged a lot of extra fees. That's why they don't just stop you. And he wasn't intentionally limited. It was basically lazy programming. Rather than write a separate bit of code to handle people with unlimited texting, they just set a random, arbitrarily high number of texts as the limit, because that doesn't require any extra code. They never actually expected anyone to reach that number.

It's cool that T-mobile was cool about it, though. They realized that the whole thing was basically a glitch and got rid of the charges. But as for the bill itself - I have no idea. My first thought was just that it was automated, but come on, there was a box, somebody had to have been involved in packaging/shipping that box.

[jerome]

... It was basically lazy programming. ...

Hey I recall what happened the last time programmers got really lazy. Anyone remember Y2K? And Vista? :D

I have a feeling that Sprint wouldn't be so nice. They'd probably just say "Pay it or we'll sue you".

[Nicholas Steel]

The one that got the bill supposedly had unlimited text messaging. So the phone company *wastes* trees just so they can print out each and EVERY one of the text messages - to prove the bill?
That was likely automated, I'm sure the letters where freighted or something and that company put it in a box before delivering. If it was less then there arbitrary number of 1000 texts then there would have been no wasted paper.

[AtmaWeapon]

http://www.wgal.com/money/19238949/detail.html

The one that got the bill supposedly had unlimited text messaging. So the phone company *wastes* trees just so they can print out each and EVERY one of the text messages - to prove the bill? Actually if you read the article it said what happened. Apparently when T-Mobile's plan system was designed, they didn't forsee offering unlimited text messaging, so their faithful outsourced codemonkeys delivered a system that let them make plans with a set text messaging limit. When T-Mobile decided to offer unlimited text messaging, either the outsourced guys were no more and no human could work with the steaming dungpile of their code or T-Mobile decided that $5 was too much to spend on a new requirement. So the "unlimited" plan was set up by putting 100,000 in the "maximum texts" field. This requires sending a text roughly once every 3 seconds in a 31-day month, so it seemed like a reasonable limit right up until Beavis and Butthead admitted to the world that they aren't doing anything at work.

[Prrkitty]

Yeah (ie beavis and butthead)... BUT! Why did they have to print the thousands of pages of paper while processing the bill?

Isn't, or more to the point - shouldn't... that be considered a waste of paper?

[rock_nog]

Because there are no checks in the program to say "Hey! This bill is wrong, it shouldn't be printed!"? No, seriously - no one ordered the computer to print thousands of pages, it did it on it's own because that's what it was programmed to do. No one had taken this situation into account.

[jerome]

True. And they are programmed by people. People have flaws. Computers are stupid anyways. Tell someone to go downstairs and get the cup off of the table, they can do it. Tell a computer that, and it needs to know to "input data and location to be acquired", to get up from couch- extend legs by contracting leg muscles until they are completely perpindicular to the floor. Move left leg forward, lean to step...

You see, they're stupid.
And so is the moron that went ahead and boxed the text list. The problem should've been realized before it ever even had gotten to the customer when text message bill handler guy says to his/her boss "Hey boss, I need a small pallet to ship this guy his bill. Do you think somethings wrong?"Common sense should've told them to look into it.

[Zank_Tripper]

Hmmm.... I wonder if it's possible to send so many text messages that the phone company owes you money?

[jerome]

Hmmm.... I wonder if it's possible to send so many text messages that the phone company owes you money?

I don't think it works like electricity to where if you generate more than what you use, then it goes on the "grid", and then they pay you for it. I figured this was a much more tactful way than the whore analogy I had thought of using.

[Cloral]

This requires sending a text roughly once every 3 seconds in a 31-day month, so it seemed like a reasonable limit right up until Beavis and Butthead admitted to the world that they aren't doing anything at work.

Not that it makes a huge difference, but the math actually works out that to send 100,000 text messages in a 30-day month, assuming you sleep for 8 hours a day, is one text message every 17 seconds. To get 217,000 they had to send a text every 8 seconds.

[AtmaWeapon]

I had flaws, I think you might too.

Seconds in a month:
31 days * 24 hours/day * 60 minutes/hour * 60 seconds/minute = 2.6784e6 s

100,000 texts / 2.6784e6 s = 0.03733572281959378734 texts/second

That's where I screwed up, I misplaced the decimal. Roughly 4/100 texts per second, or 1 text every 25 seconds.

Making the assumption you made, that's 892,800 seconds worth of texting. 100,000 / 892,800 = 0.11200716845878136201 text/s, or one every 9-10 seconds.

To get to 217,000 without sleeping, you need roughly 0.08/s, 1 text every 12 seconds or so. With sleep, 217,000 / 892,800 = 0.24305555555555555556, 1 text every 4 seconds.

Check my math, I get wonky on unit conversion. Either way they cheated since Beavis says his phone lets him set up 45 messages at once (no idea why you'd want that feature.)