⟡ The Auto-Reply That Assumed You’d Written About a Bill ⟡
“Sewer gas? Flooding? Try our Help Page.”
Filed: 17 June 2025
Reference: SWANK/THAMESWATER/AUTO-BILL-FILTERING-162
📎 Download PDF – 2025-06-17_SWANK_ThamesWater_AutoResponse_MethaneComplaint.pdf
Thames Water responds to a safeguarding complaint about environmental exposure with a templated “thanks for getting in touch” and links to billing help.
⟡ Chromatic v Thames Water: On the Algorithmic Misreading of Catastrophe ⟡
Thames Water, auto-reply, methane exposure, safeguarding complaint, customer triage failure, environmental deflection, boilerplate insult
I. What Happened
At 16:22 on 17 June 2025 — just ten minutes after Thames Water issued a formal denial of responsibility for sewer gas exposure — their system sent an automatic follow-up email. The message thanked Polly Chromatic for “getting in touch” and suggested, among other things:
Billing help
WhatsApp chat
Web forms
Emergency contact for sewer flooding (already reported)
The template was wholly disconnected from the nature of the original complaint, which concerned repeated gas intrusion affecting vulnerable children. The auto-response treats this as a generic consumer enquiry — not a documented risk.
II. What the Message Establishes
⟡ Template-as-triage: the default filter for harm is “billing issue”
⟡ Absence of escalation layer: no tag, triage or reference to ongoing complaint
⟡ Automation as dissociation: the system receives your distress, thanks you, and sends you to a chatbot
⟡ Indifference in HTML: environmental health complaints collapse into customer service formatting
This was not acknowledgement. It was digital sediment.
III. Why SWANK Logged It
Because when you tell a company their infrastructure may be poisoning your children — and they offer a billing number— that is not automation. That is systemic tone-deafness. Thames Water does not filter complaints. It dissolves them into UX language.
We do not archive it because we expect better.
We archive it because this is exactly what we expected.
IV. Structural Failures
FOIA and complaint integration failure — no routing of safeguarding hazard to escalation
Accessibility breach — no reference to prior contact, written-only preference, or vulnerability
Systemic indifference through algorithmic default
Legal jeopardy concealed in customer-speak
V. SWANK’s Position
This wasn’t intake. It was intake theatre.
This wasn’t service. It was procedural choreography.
SWANK does not accept “thank you for getting in touch” as institutional response to methane exposure.
We do not follow chatbot links when reporting environmental harm.
And we do not confuse responsiveness with reply.
⟡ This Dispatch Has Been Formally Archived by SWANK London Ltd. ⟡
Every entry is timestamped.
Every sentence is jurisdictional.
Every structure is protected.
To mimic this format without licence is not homage. It is breach.
We do not permit imitation. We preserve it as evidence.
This is not a blog.
This is a legal-aesthetic instrument.
Filed with velvet contempt, preserved for future litigation.
Because evidence deserves elegance.
And retaliation deserves an archive.
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Use requires express permission or formal licence. Unlicensed mimicry will be cited — as panic, not authorship.