By Shropshire Star Blogger Emma Suddaby

It’s funny, isn’t it, how us little people have to abide by the rules or woe betide the consequences, and yet some of the world’s bigger companies seem able to bulldoze through those same rules when it suits them? And I don’t mean funny ha ha . . .

This unhappy situation was brought home to me recently by my mobile phone provider, definitely one of the world’s bigger companies.

My phone’s on contract and my latest handset’s been beset by problems, the most recent episode being right in the middle of my Christmas holiday chaos.

So lying prostrate in an Egyptian hospital, desperately trying to hook my insurance company in England up with the relevant doctors in Egypt so that someone might eventually take me home, my phone chose that moment to die. And not only did it die, it refused to even let me access any of the information stored on it.

I’ll spare you the gory details of my eventual escape from the hospital, but needless to say, because of the phone-saga, it took several days longer than necessary and I came home to various big-and-scary international phone bills, that will, in all likelihood, take longer to pay off than the actual holiday!

After much wrangling and many long calls to the customer service team, my phone company reluctantly admitted that there is a recognised fault with this particular handset. But hang on a minute . . . a recognised fault? And yet the handset’s still for sale – how can it possibly be right for a company to carry on selling a product they know is faulty?

They won’t replace the phone based on the flimsy argument that even though it’s gone wrong before and will likely go wrong again, it’s now repaired and working. I guess all I can do is hope that the next time I really need my phone to work, it does.

And the real sting in the tail is that even after all of this, if I want to get out of my contract, I have to buy myself out of it. Now if I went to my bank and stopped the payments to my phone company, I’d be breaching my contract with them, so surely by knowingly providing me with faulty goods, they’re breaching their contract with me?

Maybe I’m just a simple country bumpkin, unaware of the workings of the business world. Maybe I’m idealistic, a little naive. Maybe I’m missing some important point that would explain these one-sided rules – but then again, maybe some of these big international companies need closer inspection. And then maybe they’d start abiding by the same rules the rest of us mere mortals have to observe.

And then maybe, just maybe, we wouldn’t have got into this mess in the first place.

Quote of the week: “Honesty pays, but it doesn’t seem to pay enough to suit some people.” - FM Hubbard