AM Health Care-El Paso, Texas

-------'R'-'E'-'S'-'P'-'E'-'C'-'T'
--I'll tell you what it means to me!----

Dear Manager,
You phoned me up on Friday, pestering me, and contributing to a thoroughly unpleasant day.
(When an eighty-four year old woman suffering from severe pain is denied access to needed pain relief, that does sort of get under your skin--especially if the woman in question is your mother. But that unpleasantness was foreshadowed by a phone call from the boss (who does not use so honest an epithet) at AM Health Care.) You also phoned up my mother and insulted her, spoke to her in a condescending fashion. (See explanatory note below)

My mother and I have decided that we do not wish to have further contacts with you.

Indeed, as I review the history of our association with your organization, the following fact becomes salient:

In the past several months, your organization has been more eager to steal my mother's time with a survey of customer satisfaction than it has been eager to actually provide the care and services to which she was entitled.

That alone is a good reason to terminate our relationship. Your phone call, and especially the insulting way in which you spoke to my mother, was only the final nail in the coffin.

I wonder: do you attend seminars where so-called experts teach you to "capture" Medicare funds? And wasn't that (the "capture" of Medicare funds) the real purpose of your annoying phone calls?

That's a thought I've had. I don't say it's true. I have no proof. But, I've had enough signs and indications of the quality of what you are providing to say conclusively and with no doubt in my mind: Goodbye. It's not been good to know you,.

EXPLANATORY NOTE on Age-ist Language and the Prevalence of Age-ism among institutions in the USA

When someone is complaining that she has been treated unfairly by a system which is, in effect, systematically AGE-IST, it is not nice to refer to her as "sweetie" (or "honey" or "cutie")
Those terms imply inequality. They imply that the old person is "cute" and not a fully responsible or fully competent human being.

An analogy which might help to clarify my point: Suppose an African-American woman who refused to sit in the back of the bus were addressed or described as a "cute darkie".....or some such similar epithet. I think it would be grotesquely demeaning, and so too, is it grotesquely demeaning to hear an eighty-four year old woman say that she is not getting the care she needs, and respond with language suggesting she is somehow 'cute'....as if her claims and concerns were not fully deserving of respect.

A sociolinguistic treatise which could be written about this. (For all I know, maybe someone has written one.) The one place I've come across somethign similar is in a book by Simon Blackburn, "Ruling Passions", where he discusses the sexist point of view which sees women as "cute", hence childish.

For a non-scholarly, but wholly accurate accvount, one could see various episodes of the TV serial, "Waiting for God", in which the heroic old lady Diana deals with condescending language in the natural way--by striking the offending party with her cane.