Outside the box: I just texted to say... I love you — 1,852 times

MOBILE phones are a wonderful thing. A digital umbilical cord, they allow your kids to roam freely, getting up to unsupervised god knows what, but still smart enough to send the odd reassuring text telling you are alive and well, whilst forewarning you of their next demands for food, cash, a lift, or all three.

The phone rules are simple — no porn, no downloading three hour movies or rip-off games, no international calls, and bob’s your uncle – a tenner a month contract, 500 free texts, lots of free talking minutes, and everyone’s happy. At least, until the €150 bill arrives for one of the mobiles. You might stare at your computer screen, trying to figure out which phone it relates to — your own? Have you been downloading adult movies in your sleep? No? It must be the youngest one — he has only recently got a phone, and has obviously been duped into downloading all those games with hidden charges.

But no — the €150 bill is showing up on screen as belonging to the phone of Perfect Daughter. How could this be? She has had her phone for ages now, and has never gone over her tenner a month limit before. Oh my god, she’s been hacked! That’s the only feasible possibility. So you ring the phone provider’s call centre in the Philippines and tell them that you have received a crazy bill.

“Mmm,” says the nice lady in the Philippines. “Lemme check.” And off she goes, leaving you on tinny Euro-pop hold, when she begins to issue arrest warrants for the pirates who have stolen your daughter’s phone line. But when she comes back, she says that there is no sign of hacking, or other criminal activity. It’s just texts.

“Texts?” you might scream, feeling you are falling into a digital black hole overseen by the ghost of Kafka. Obviously you dispute such a claim, reiterating that Perfect Daughter would never, ever run up such a bill, because she is sensible and responsible and……

“I email you bill,” interrupts the nice lady. And so she does. Page after page of tiny numbers, everything forensically timed and dated, and there is it — the same mobile number, texted every few minutes, over and over again, 1,852 times. The intervals between the texts — to this same number — are mere minutes apart, so that the bill reads like digital ping pong.

Has this ever happened to you? That your Perfect Daughter, just turned 13, ran up a monster phone bill, because she had Met A Boy? And then proceeded to text him almost two thousand times in the space of a fortnight? “What do you expect,” she says cheerfully, on presentation of the bill. “I’m a teenager now. That’s what we do.” And she grins at you, because she is in love.