SMS detox - 19 year old racks up four grand bill from text messaging

By redlined on Friday, October 14th, 2005

A 19 year old from Scotland is being treated for an addiction to all things text, after sending 700 texts a week and resigning from his job after the bosses found out he had sent 8000 emails in a month.

In a year the teenager spent £4500 on text messages, by dividing this by 365 days in a year we make this an average of just over £12 a day.

Counsellors at the Renfrewshire Council on Alcohol (RCA) Trust in Paisley said they have never seen anything like it in 25 years of treating addictions.

We were a little unsure of the 8000 emails in a month figure though, assuming a 40 hour week or 160 hours a month, 8000/160=50 emails per hour, nearly one every minute! Saying this, I have friends who abuse their corporate email accounts to basically hold conversations, rather than use instant messaging, but to keep this rate up all day every day sounds an awful lot :)

The text and email addict said the majority of his e-mails were between him and his girlfriend, from whom he has since split up.

So next time you get a slightly larger phone bill than normal count yourself lucky. Even if this guy was on a reasonable 5 figure salary a £4500k phone bill could have been a quarter of his annual salary!

Read the full BBC article here