How the King learned about text messages

A long time ago, in a place far, far away, there lived a King. This King had a cell phone account with business phones and personal phones on it, and although not a large Kingdom, it was big enough where someone in his Kingdom seemed to alway need a new phone.

One day the King left his castle and mounted his trusty steed to venture to the local scribe's office to pick up any messages that may have been written for him, and at that location, the scribe handed him a box from his phone provider.

"Ahh," the King thought. "Someone in the Kingdom has ordered a new phone. Alas, I knew not of the ordering, but a Knight must be with his proper armor at all times."

The King retreated back over the moat to his castle, whereupon he ordered the box unsealed. A trusty Knight unsheathed his sword, and with a mighty blow, creased the box such that the flaps flew open to reveal....

The phone?

No, alas. Twas no phone, but was instead, a message. And another message. And another message. And so on, and so forth, as the messages piled upon one another to the point that they subsumed the entire box, weighing it down, line by line.

With text messages.

The King, puzzled at this box, and not understanding the meaning of the lined messages, pondered this. The Jester, being a trustworthy soul, and ever-present near the King, looked to the King, and inquired,

"Oh, King, for what may you be so bepuzzled?"

The King looked downward at the lowly Jester, who, although low of rank, was frank of word and wiser than thought, and said,

"Yes, Jester. These lines, they confound me. Should I behead the perpetrator of these text lines?"

The Jester, wise enough to play the fool, saw the text lines, and saw that they were not those of a commoner, nor those of a Knight--but those of the 15-year old Princess, daughter of the King, and he knew that much would be lost with the head of the Princess.

"No, sire, but these texts are important--so much so that more than 100, nay, more than 1,000 per day are sent and received, at the castle, to provide news to the Princess, who shares them with the Queen, and then to you."

The King, having studied humanities and whose only math skills centered on "how many angels can stand on the point of a needle," was more bepuzzled.

"Call in Princess Sarah," the King said, "and let her share this news."

And so the beautiful Princess Sarah was called upon to explain.

"Father King," Princess Sarah explained, "I did not send more than 1,000 texts per day as the Jester claims," she said. "For he is mistaken. He is, but a fool, of course."

She continued.

"I only sent 500 per day," she continued patiently, "the other 500 were sent to me."

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is how my sophomore daughter in high school explained how she had 32,000 text messages in one month on her cell phone one March, nine years ago. And that's when I learned about text messages.

I was wondering when this tale would get around to your daughter's texting, which I remembered from times past. 32 thousand. Man alive. I seem to remember us playing some math games on how many that was per waking hour, and it was stunning. works out to one every couple of minutes for every waking moment or something, just the sending part.

You can tell I'm not over the UNC-CH game.

I get thousands of texts per month. On U.K. game days I can easily get a 100+ in three hours time. Luckily my plan has unlimited text. Unfortunately we do not have unlimited data and that has resulted in some whopper phone bills.