Just when you thought the tales of Comcast's customer service couldn't get any worse... well, let's just show you this picture:

This is what appears to be an actual bill sent to a Comcast customer in Spokane, Washington. The customer's first name is "Ricardo," but it was misspelled as "Asshole."

A travel blog called BoardingArea has the story, and it appears to be genuine. Comcast confirmed to Ars that it has apologized to the customer and that the company is looking into technology solutions to prevent future problems of this nature. Comcast is also revisiting the training it provides to its representatives to make sure that customers are treated with respect, a company spokesperson told us.

The rude name change happened after Lisa Brown and her husband, Ricardo, decided to cancel their Comcast TV service. BoardingArea's Christopher Elliott reports:

I asked Brown why a Comcast employee might want to change Ricardo’s name to Asshole. “I am shocked,” she told me. She explained that her family was having financial difficulties and needed to reduce their cable bill. She’d called Comcast to cancel the cable portion of her account, for which she had to pay a $60 fee. Instead of complying immediately, a representative escalated her call to a retention specialist, who tried to persuade her to keep the cable service and sign a new two-year contract. “I was never rude,” she says. “It could have been that person was upset because I didn’t take the offer.”

Brown tried to get her husband's name on the couple's bill corrected, even visiting the local Comcast office and calling "higher-ups in the Washington region."

"But she wasn’t getting anywhere and needed help," BoardingArea wrote.

Once the press started making inquiries, Brown got a promise from Comcast that the employee responsible would be fired, that the $60 cancelation fee would be waived, and that the account name had been corrected. After the BoardingArea story was posted, Comcast went even further in trying to make things right. An update on the story this afternoon says that Comcast "offer[ed] her a full refund for the last two years and two years of service at no charge."

Comcast VP of Communications Steve Kipp told BoardingArea, “We have spoken with our customer and apologized for this completely unacceptable and inappropriate name change. We have zero tolerance for this type of disrespectful behavior and are conducting a thorough investigation to determine what happened. We are working with our customer to make this right and will take appropriate steps to prevent this from happening again.”

DSLReports pointed out that this incident is similar to one from 2005 in which a customer's name was replaced by "bitch dog."

Comcast and Time Warner Cable, which are attempting to merge, rank last in the industry in the American Customer Satisfaction Index. Comcast Executive VP David Cohen told the Senate Judiciary Committee during a hearing on the merger that Comcast is "deeply disappointed" in its customer service and is trying to do better. Last September, Comcast gave one of its executives the job of fixing its customer service problems, but it's obviously going to take a while.