Esperanza Martinez, a California native, recently received a letter from her cable provider, Time Warner.
“We know you recently decided to cancel your services,” the letter, obtained by Ars, begins. It’s not a threatening sentence, per se, but it contains a certain menace, an eerie omniscience. A faceless corporation given complete knowledge over its subscribers, made all the more unsettling by the letterhead, the placement of the all-seeing eye that is the Time Warner logo.
More directly hostile is the letter’s opening, “Dear C**t Martinez.”
The letter goes on to offer Martinez a chance at redemption, promising better service if she would only agree to return to their loving arms.
But even more baffling is the fact that Martinez never even canceled her subscription.
“I am a current Time Warner Cable customer,” she wrote in an email to Ars. “And I just received a letter today addressed to “C**t” Martinez.” Her email goes on to clarify that while Martinez is indeed her last name, “C**t” is not her first.
Time Warner customer service informed her that the change occurred on the same day that she spoke to a representative about issues she was having with her cable box.
“I was not upset even when they could not resolve my issue and had to send a technician out,” she said.
Martinez has since been given what appears to be an industry standard apology: free cable. One year of free service, in her case.
She also told Ars that she received multiple calls on Thursday morning, sincerely apologizing for the error.
“We are truly sorry for the disgraceful treatment of Ms. Martinez,” a company spokesperson told Ars. “Our investigation showed that this was done by an employee at a third-party vendor. We have terminated our agreement with this vendor and are changing our processes to prevent this from happening again.”
No telling what Time Warner called that vendor during his termination.
It’s possible that this outburst by relatively tame Time Warner has another cause. In a $45.2 billion merger, the second largest cable provider in the United States is about to be bought by the country’s largest – Comcast. It could be that Time Warner’s customer service just wasn’t quite horrible enough to meet company expectations.
“Super Bitch” is bad, but Time Warner may have gotten a little overzealous with “C**t.”
