Two Friends Plus 217,000 Text Messages Equals $26,000 Bill

April 23, 2009— -- It was the ultimate bromance: Two Pennsylvania men spent most of March sending each other constant text messages. In the end, more than 217,000 messages were sent and one of the friends ended up with a $26,300 bill.

"It pretty much started as a joke. I don't personally really like texting all that much," said Nick Andes, 29, who lives in Lancaster.

Andes and his friend Doug Klinger, 30, thought nothing of the messages. They both have unlimited text plans as part of their cell phone package. Who says you can't have too much technology?

"He would text me in the morning, sometimes I wouldn't respond. So he would just send over a whole bunch of text messages and I would get irritated with it so I would send back as many as I felt like sending, just to try and irritate him," said Andes, a messenger and title clerk who loads trucks for UPS in the morning.

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Then the two friends wondered what the world record for texting was and if they could beat it. A quick Internet search found a record of 182,000 messages sent in 2005 Deepak Sharma in India.

During a few test days in February, Andes and Klinger got up to 6,000 or 7,000 messages a day. That's when they knew it was possible to break the record. Once Andes' new billing cycle started on March 7, they started typing away.

"It was all legitimate words and stuff but it was all nonsense," Klinger said. "A lot of times it was 'hey what's up,' 'how are you doing,' 'what's up,' 'hahaha,' 'lol,' over and over again."

On a typical day, the two men would exchange 8,000 to 10,000 messages. The count would have been higher if they hadn't taken off a few days.

"We went over 12,000 a couple of days. I'm pretty sure we could do 15,000 a day and we may have," Andes said, noting that he wasn't about to count all the messages sent on a particular day.

The finally tally on his bill from T-Mobile: 217,033 text messages. He sent 142,000 and received 75,000 from Klinger, who works as a screen printer.