Dear Time Warner Cable, Southern Tier of New York Department,
Let me mention how happy I am with Time Warner in general. Seriously. You handle my phone, my internet and my cable with nary a complaint from either party. While I may, at times, shake my fist a the sky and feel like I'm paying a bit too much, deep deep down I realize that the price is about right. In general terms, I am a pleased customer.
However, in one specific point, I am now unsatisfied, so much so that my irritation is coloring the manner in which I perceive the service as a whole. For the past month, the message below is what I see when I turn my DVR to 0006:
On Friday, December 30, WPNY-UPN Utica elected to relocate it's transmission site further from the Oneonta area.
As a result, WPNY's signal m WPNY's signal is now unavailable to Time Warner in the Oneonta area. We are sorry for any inconvenience this may cause.
There are two reasons for my complaint.
As a customer, I don't get to decide to not carry the channels that do not meet my rigorous standards. In an ideal world, I could put helpful little messages in front of the stations I don't feel like dealing with anymore. For example: On Friday, December 30, Adrienne elected to stop Fox News from entering her home. As a result, she insists that her bill be credited the amount that this station costs her each month. And just so you know, next month she'll be doing away with EWTN.
We all know that I can't do that. Channel line-ups have to be bundled, you'd say. Fine, I'd say. When I signed on and committed to a bundle that contained channels that displease me, it was with the full knowledge that I'd have more channels that I enjoy to balance everything out.
Now, however, I no longer have one of those channels. I like UPN. I enjoy Everybody Loves Chris. I really enjoy America's Next Top Model, even though I am slightly ashamed to admit it. Now that pleasure is gone. The reasoning you offer seems false and petty. Four months ago, when WPNY's signal was knocked out by a series of thunderstorms, the blame was solely placed on its tower. They have a signal again, but had to move to a new tower. I don't deny that WPNY's decision to move their tower has a negative impact on your ability to carry the signal. Still, there are a couple of UPN stations in the area. We get a number of local channels from Binghamton, Utica, Syracuse and Albany. Why not UPN?
Really, the loss of UPN, while irritating, isn't what really upsets me. Please reread the first part of the statement that runs on 0006. Do you notice anything? Do you think an English teacher might?
While I understand that the message, at first, was thrown up in retaliation for WPNY's tower relocation donnybrook. In the heat of passion, grammatical mistakes can be made. I'm not completely militant about punctuation. By now your anger should have cooled enough to proofread. Evidence would prove otherwise.
If I can't have UPN, could I at least have a message that is grammatically correct? I'm not asking for Shakespearean sonnets or Proustian prose. I simply want the apostrophes to be in the right place, which, in this case, is not in the word at all.
Sincerely,
etc....