US Student: 1,725 texts in 3 weeks 'burnt my phone out'

I just love, love, love, reading these texting-is-new-and-cool stories from smalltown America. I find them fascinating indications into the mindsets of many in the USA. It is far too easy to think that absolutely everyone has been texting for years. Still very new in America.

Here’s one article I came across today.

Link: Graduation 2007: Area students give text messaging a thumbs up

And a cell phone Jerusha Clark owned couldn’t handle the text messages she was sending from it; she sent 1,725 in three weeks and burned the phone out, she said. Clark, 18, is from Dayton Early College Academy.

I think it’s pretty impossible to burn your handset out by sending 82 texts a day or 3.4 texts an hour (that’s what 1,725 works out as). Yes, if you’ve bought one of the crappest and cheapest handsets on the market. But even your bog-standard Nokia 1000 series handset, you know, the cheapest of the cheaaaaapest, shouldn’t fall apart under that sort of use.

It’s telling that the girl in question was able to raise this as an issue to the reporter — and for the reporter to believe it and then publish it.

I don’t think your average text-mad British journalist would have included that as an issue. Anyway, all very interesting.

I like reading the mini case studies that the journalists include. Texting is that advanced there, however, that driving-while-texting has it’s own ‘DWT’ acronym:

Most seniors in the groups also admitted to driving while texting, a practice some insist is safe.

Courtney Dortch, 18, of Stivers School for the Arts won’t DWT again, however. Dortch drove off the road while texting and was caught by her father.

“I got in so much trouble I never did it again,” she said. Meanwhile, Leah Ward, 18, of Colonel White High School, denied she DWTs, stating that she focuses more on driving.