Despite the facetious thread title, I have a very real and serious question. I’m going to explain the situation in a straightforward, just-the-facts-ma’am manner because one or more of the parties involved will eventually see this thread.
My friend Karen went online and accessed her husband’s cell phone account. She found lots of text messages being sent around 1:00 a.m. PST. She has trust issues, and is accusing her husband of extramarital activities. He denies it vehemently, and my male intuition says he’s telling the truth. He swears that he’s never sent anyone a text message at one o’clock in the morning, and that on the dates in question he was texting entries to Deal or No Deal. Is there any reason whatsoever why the timestamps on these messages would indicate that the messages were sent several hours after the fact? I’ve spent a couple of hours Googling this with tenuous results. I’ve found some indications that text message timestamps are not notoriously accurate, but no real solid information that I can present to Karen. I have a theory that it may involve the sheer number of messages received by NBC. If all the lines are filled, the messages might be queued for several hours, and the timestamp might reflect when the message was finally successfully transmitted. Am I on the right track here? Can anybody offer any other explanation?
Is it possible to get a listing of text messages from your cell company? If so, I’d say that would be more than enough proof either way. Do they even keep records of that?
I’m too busy laughing at this scenario to offer any helpful advice. I can only say that if Howie Fucking Mandel were in any way to blame for my marriage’s disintegration, I’d have to kill myself. Best of luck to your friend.
I would guess that the time zone thing may be an issue, and try to see if there is a menu or something in the phone that shows the timestamps in a certain time zone. Are they perhaps text messages sent back by Deal to confirm they were received?
isn’t it easier for him to say, “look, we were asleep in bed together last night at 1AM, how could I bet sending text messages?” OTOH , if they are apart several times a week at 1am, maybe there is something going on:)
Wow that’s one crazy wife. Snooping around and then throwing a fit over something that’s probably nothing. I bet if a jealous man did that, the climate of this thread would be much different…
As for the OP, doesn’t it have a record of what number he texted? If the number he texted to is the same as the deal or no deal number, he should be in the clear.
Timestamps online will be set when the message is actually sent by the phone. Sometimes my phone will not send messages for up to a few hours because of service problems or because I’m out of range. When I was with Cingular, I had up to 48 hour delays because of internal Cingular problems – the messages would just sit in the phone outbox with “Trying to send” status. Say this is the case, I don’t know if he would still be charged for them if they arrived that late, so they might not show up on the bill. My phone at the time gave no indication that this was happening, by the way. It looked like the message would send, but then I’d just my outbox and it’d be sitting there.
Well if she threw him out, then I doubt that even a personal visit from Howie would patch things up.
But it did occur to me that a quick and dirty way to find out if he is lying is compare dates of the messages to the dates that the show aired. Now if the messages all show up at 1AM they may all have a date one day after the show aired. But if the show was on Tuesday, and the cell says Sunday, I think we can agree that he is screwed.
If however all the dates match up the one of two conditions exist
A. He really did text messages to DOND and the date stamp is incorrect.
B. He only texts his girlfriend at 1 AM after DOND was on.
C. He is lying and can think really, really fast on his feet, and is damn lucky to pick a show that takes text messages, but on the correct date. (missed the time though)
