While waiting for the kettle to provide hot water for much needed coffee, I zapped through the available tv programmes until I got stuck on a SAT.1 ‘documentary’ about teenagers who got themselves into financial troubles because of excessive mobile phoning.

Fair enough, life under peer pressure can be tough, we all know this. Maybe their parents should have told them to keep the old pre-paid phones. But being completely out of the loop with respect to juvenile communication trends, I suspect most parents could not really anticipate a problem when they were lured into consent by their kids explaining that unlimited usage 2-year contracts have lower per-minute rates. So as with many inter-generational cultural gaps, this kind of problem was probabyl inevitable.

Strangely, I have to say, I can understand the parents better than the kids in this respect, especially when the report mentioned that a lot of the charges are actually incurred by “text message sex services” – a problem probably largely affecting young males. But even for today’s hormon-crazed fourteen year olds, what’s the attraction of “text message sex”? Aren’t those three words some kind of oxymoron even to them?

If not, I feel the journalist got the story wrong. If not, I would suggest the mobile phone charges aren’t their most important problem.