For Parents of Texting Addicts: A Story You Should Know

I have a 14-year-old son. He's had his own cell phone -- an LG enV from Verizon Wireless -- for maybe a year. He hardly ever calls anybody with it. However, he text-messages with a circle of friends that apparently rivals the population of Montenegro. Month after month, his texting ramped up. We had a plan that allowed him 1,500 out-of-network (i.e. non-Verizon) texts a month. That's about 50 texts a day. And in-network texts are free, so he could text within VZ as much as he wanted. Who in heaven could text more than that?

Well.

December came. My son spent Christmas week with relatives, away from home. While he was there, a friend of his got killed in a car crash. Understandably, everyone who knew the boy reached out to each other for support -- mostly, it seems, via texts. Over the course of the billed month, from mid-December to mid-January, my son sent or received more than 12,000 texts. That would be 400 a day; in a 12-hour day, about 30 an hour, or one every two minutes.

I had no idea until the bill arrived. For his texting overcharges alone, it read: $657.70.

Now, I know I'm not alone. Most times, when I tell this story to a parent of a teen, I hear some version of it spilled back to me -- one month of crazy over-texting, usually followed by some repercussion that gets it under control. Teens, it seems, have a hard time getting a grip on how much texting costs how much money, at least until they get a wicked lesson. And apparently Verizon Wireless has a bit of sympathy for parents who run into just such a situation. Sympathy that I'm sure is born of self-interest, as in not losing a particular pissed-off customer or winding up on the bad end of a class-action lawsuit.

A friend urged me to call Verizon Wireless customer service and explain what happened. I had zero faith that it would do any good. I didn't believe VZ would give two hoots, and instead expected the company to secretly love it when people get caught in a texting snare and contribute mightily to the bottom line. I figured I would not even get a real person on the line -- or, if I did, that the person would be somewhere in Bangalore. But I tried anyway, and got Pamela.

She was amazingly sweet for someone who has to listen to people like me all day. And she was good. Ooo, very good. She listened and understood, like a camp counselor. She had solutions, some of which involved up-selling me to an unlimited texting package -- which, admittedly, will wind up saving me more than it would have cost me to continue feeding my kid's text habit. Then she put me on hold. When she came back, she said she had permission to credit me the whole $657. Just once, she said a little sternly. Don't expect this again. But still -- that's a big credit.

PARENTS NEED TO KNOW THIS IS POSSIBLE. Verizon Wireless, as you can imagine, doesn't exactly advertise that you can call for forgiveness. And every situation is going to be different -- it helped, for instance, that I was a long-standing Verizon Wireless customer with a good bill-paying record. But if you are ever in this fix -- if you get whacked with an outrageous one-time bill because your kid went off the texting deep end or downloaded hundreds of games and ringtones -- call the company's customer service line. Tell them about it. They've probably heard it before. If you're a customer worth keeping, the person on the other end might be able to ease the pain a bit.