Well, you know what its like; you are very busy and the telecommunications salesperson seems to have exactly what you want.

You ask him about notice of cancellation and are told that you can cancel anytime after the first year, So, satisfied with the service on offer, you sign on the dotted line.

Then five years and one month later, when you give notice of cancellation, you find out that you can give notice, but you can only cancel at each anniversary of your contract.

Unbelievable, maybe, but true definitely. We have just experienced this when changing our telephone services for our office furniture showroom in Colchester.

And the service provider is TML Communications Ltd, and they are meant to be one of the better service providers, apparently, or so they tell us.

It does make you wonder why business life could not be simpler. When you decide to change a service provider, surely a months notice should be enough.

Why do these companies feel the need to tie you in with unnecessarily long contracts, and more importantly fail to make you aware of such an important condition, and one which frankly most people would not agree to had they been made aware of it at the time of signing.

If you are really organised and cannot get the conditions changed prior to signing, you can write to the service provider as soon as your contract starts with them, advising them that you are cancelling your service with effect from the anniversary date. Then you can just roll the service on for as long as you wish, knowing that all you need do to cancel the service is to give the provider one months notice.

And why did we want to change our service provider.  Well, we have finally reached the last straw with British Telecom, so we wanted to move all of our Colchester office telephone services to one independent provider. And what was the final straw with BT.

After our main office furniture showroom lines in Colchester stopped working BT came in to investigate. They found out that mice had got into their manhole in the road and had chewed the wiring. They replaced all of the wiring, and as a precaution also changed the wiring into our offices.

They then charged us over £400 for fixing the fault which they said had occurred on our premises. Two of our office furniture advisors were chatting to the BT engineer whist he was carrying out the work and he stated that it was a BT fault, but by the time the paperwork had got back to the invoicing desk, the fault had mysteriously become our responsibility

Strange but True.

If only everyone could be as honest and straight as your average office furniture dealer!