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...

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