Three and a Half Hours!

The events are real, the time lines have been adjusted for readability purposes!

I have a teenage grand daughter, Miss C. She is bright, articulate, smart as a whip and a sassy spoken lassie. But, she has a flaw, a flaw I guess a lot of today’s teenagers are starting to exhibit.

I’m hell on wheels about this new flaw, your not allowed to practice it when your alone with me. I call it the “cell phone texting syndrome.” It is exhibited by the need to be constantly texting friends, animals, Martians and anyone else in the known Universe who has a cell phone whose number you know.

Miss C comes home from school and disappears into her bedroom not to be seen until dinner, then disappears again not to be seen until the next morning (which is fine with her siblings). Ask any member of her family what’s she is doing and you’ll be told she’s texting. And, I thought she was doing homework -- I knew she wasn’t cleaning her room.

I really didn’t known until recently how much she texted on her cell phone until her Mother, Miss A, told me that Miss C’s cell phone bill listed over 14,000 incoming texts and a little over 13,000 outgoing texts. That’s about 433 outgoing texts a day and if you give each text message 30 seconds to compose and send that’s approximately 216 minutes or 3 ½ hours a day. Since Miss C has kept her grades up and meets most of her household commitments, that 3 ½ hours is coming from somewhere else and she admits that time is from sleeping. No wonder she’s been looking so hollow eyed. If you ask me that’s a bit much (I have 22 outgoing calls on my cell phone from the last three months!).

It’s a bit much for her mother too; so she grabbed up the cell phone and limited it to use for when Miss C is out of the house. Then I watched Miss C go into cell phone withdrawal. You could see her walking around the house with a vacant look on her face and her hands constantly reaching back to her back pockets looking for her cell phone. She said her fingers itched and she couldn’t keep them still. After an hour without her phone she was screaming at her mother “OK! I’m addicted to my cell phone, I need it back!”

Of course she didn’t get it back but it shows how much our kids can get hooked on the damm things. Her Mother will be working on limiting Miss C’s phone usage but I think I’ll stay away for a while. Things could get tough at my daughters for a while, twitching fingers and all.