A New World Record!

Who hasn’t heard of Guinness World Book of Records?

A conversation-starter if nothing else, since its humble beginning at a May 4, 1951 shooting party attended among others by an opinionated Sir Hugh Beaver, then the managing director of Guinness Beers, it has prompted a slew of daredevils to try their hand at spending hours in isolation with scorpions, rubbing their eyes with ghost chilies, dangling a heavy weight off a swallowed sword, lifting 71 kilos with an ear, balancing a car on their head.  You name it, people probably tried it.  Or if not, dollars to donuts, someone somewhere is thinking about giving it a stab.

And though I personally think these are all a waste of perfectly good bodies — considering how many diseases, accidents, acts of nature are already lying in wait to make mincemeat of the mass of cells, electrolytes, and water somehow hanging together and pretending to be a coherent whole — at least, those daredevils are doing their worst to themselves.

What Berks Technical Institute alumni Nick Andes, 29, and Doug Klinger, 30, attempted is…interesting, perfectly useless — and is going to cost, however little, to everyone currently enjoying their cell phone service through T-Mobile.  In a nutshell, the duo exchanged over 217,000 text messages in the period of one month.

Not to say they were all THAT prolific.  Mostly, the messages consisted of hello’s, LOLs, and, as the gentlemen themselves admitted, a whole lot of repeats.  Exhibiting commendable technical prowess, the pair managed to rig their phones to spit out multiple messages.  During a February test run they learned they could send 6K-7K of those awesomely articulate missives daily, and the quest for world domination…sorry, the latest Guinness Book record was on.

Previously, it has been set at 182,000 sent in 2005 by one Deepak Sharma in India, and our wise guys couldn’t leave the well enough alone.

As we can see, they have succeeded — and one of them got settled with a $26K bill that cost over $25 to mail out.  Considering both were on an unlimited service plan, the charges were quickly rescinded and an internal T-Mobile investigation was launched.

But if the T-Mobile execs asked me, I would have said the best recourse would have been to send a similar folio to the man’s partner in crime.  I would have even picked up the tab for the mailing.  Because, you know what immediately occurred to me reading about this amazing feat?

The text messaging rates are calculated according to usage, and obviously, a duo of doofuses can’t significantly affect the multi-million bell curve.  At the same time, “can’t significantly” doesn’t stand for “wouldn’t”, so, however infinitesimal the resulting increase in the rates for every regular user after the accounting team gets through adding these charges to T-Mobile’s own monthly bill, it would still be a fraction of a cent too much.

Thank you, guys! Looking forward to future feats of daring.  But, please, could you limit them to your own bank accounts from now on?