The numbers involved in this case are almost otherworldly. In particular:
“On average, I usually send 30,000 to 35,000,” she said.
This is what befuddles me. 30 to 35 thousand text messages?! How is this possible?
I’d believe that if it was a lifetime figure (if you lived to 70 that’d be an average of 1.2 texts per day, which still seems a bit excessive to me but is nonetheless plausible); bear in mind that texts have only been around for fifteen years, so that number would mean 6 texts every day since the service was invented.
It’s the ‘usually’ that gets me. Since you don’t normally get billed as a lump sum for mobile phones (you just have the amount for your calls and texts subtracted from your virtual balance), and the article doesn’t give any context, it’s hard to judge what she means. It’s difficult to believe that she could possibly be referring to a timescale less than a year, since that would mean a shocking 90 texts per day (a month would be unthinkable - over 1000 per day).
What throws it into even more ambiguity is that the article says that she only got her iPhone in June. Specifically, the iPhone came out on June 29th, while the video of the bill was posted on August 12th. This gives her a maximum of 43 days to have accumulated that bill. ($275 in 43 days means over $6 per day.)
Her comment of “On average, I usually send 30,000 to 35,000,” is placed in such a way as to suggest that she is referring to the timescale reflected by the bill. Assume that this is the case and that’s less than a cent per text - a very generous tariff (we can assume she’s not using a special ‘pay monthly’ tariff because if this was the case her bill wouldn’t have had to be itemised at all). Since the tariff I’m with charges me 10p (20 cents) per text, I think it’s fair enough to assume that this is impossible.
Therefore, assume her comment refers to annual text emission (purely because it’s the only way the figures make a lick of sense). As mentioned, this comes to 90 texts per day. Assuming the generous rate of 5 cents per text, in 43 days this would come to 3,870 texts at $193.50. In context, this is moderately plausible, representing 70% of her bill. It’s near-impossible to deduce how many calls made up the remaining 30%, but work with what we have.
If she did indeed send 3,870 texts within 43 days, these would all need to be itemised on her bill. Assuming that 50 lines of text make up an A4 page, only 78 pages would be required for the text messages. Spreading 3,870 items over 300 pages means only 12 items per page, which, it has to be admitted, could be condensed.
But still. If this bit of applied maths has proved anything, it’s that if you’re sending that many text messages in any time frame, you have more pressing things to worry about than the trees that died to make your bill.