We were starting to wonder why we'd gone a whole month without someone having to take out a second mortgage to pay their wireless broadband bill. Not to disappoint, the UPI notes how a 13-year-old boy racked up a $21,917 Verizon Wireless bill. How? The kid downloaded 1.4 million kilobytes (just 1.4GB) of data last month on his father's plan according to the Associated Press.

Apparently, the father made the bankruptcy-worthy mistake of failing to set the family up on a real data plan. As such, Verizon by default wound up charging the father $1.99 for each megabyte without anybody at Verizon stopping to realize that the bill total was batshit insane.

Luckily for the account holder, stalwart news outlets like "Good Morning America" grabbed a hold of the story and Verizon was forced to forgive the total in its entirety. We'll assume that without said media attention, Verizon would have been left in peace to engage in their usual practice of nickel and diming the hell out of their wireless customers.

Just imagine the fun we'll have once companies like Time Warner Cable and AT&T successfully implement billing models on your terrestrial landline connection that involve having all of your bandwidth consumption tracked at huge markups over cost?