Confessions of an overworked mind by soham

Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article by Soham Majumdar are personal. 

The author had written the article at 2:30am in his 1 year in the industry. A few questions that he till date couldn't answer has opened the floor for PR Professionals today to tackle the questions:

PS: Don't Kill Me For This :)

Unanswered Questions in PR

A perfect read for a gloomy ‘work-cannon’ loaded Monday

After about one and a half years of my stint in the boxing arena called ‘public relations’, I am faced with these inexplicably intriguing questions. Yes I agree that, to most of us, the questions may seem unintelligent but as the wise man say- Questions are never stupid, answers are. There can be countless justifications negating the validity of my question’s intelligence quotient, but I won’t ask you to relax and then think about the answers coz in that state, most likely your answers can only label my questions as ‘stupid to the stupidest of extent’.:-)

So, here I make a humble request to all of you. Try and answer my questions on a typical PARANOID day at work when all the devils of the world and beyond contaminate the souls of our revered journalists, corp com people and other stakeholders.:-)

Here are some of my questions (there are many more):

· Why does that particular abandoned lonely soul in corp comm needs an SMS update early in the morning, inside his washroom post a press conference/interview/trade briefing that happened a day earlier and why they can’t get out of their washrooms till the scans hit their inbox- I guess they fear that the coverage would evaporate in thin air if they are late in brooding over it…(Or their email inboxes are perpetually in the self-destruct mode?) :)

· Why do we send the ‘same’ clip to the client in a wide spectrum of multiple diametrically diverse formats that technology has ever managed to bless us with. – SCANS, PDF, PPT, EXCEL, ZIP, MONTHBOOKS, WEEKLY REPORTS, CDS, DVDS, TRANSCRIPTS, Calculating their AD rates, etc etc- Cant they not decipher things in the first go…?

· Why do the that impatient corp com soul behave as if they will lose their jobs, their stocks would crash and their employers will be on the streets begging if a particular coverage that appeared 5 years ago is not mailed to them within a 5 mins timeframe?

· Why do they spin protracted yards and wax eloquent about going ‘Green’ and similar policies and enclose this line in their mail - “Please don't print this e-mail unless you really need to. “ if on the other hand, they want coverage on every piece of paper in the planet?

· Why do they endow us with incredibly inhuman deadlines and act as if the universe will fall apart if we don’t meet the same. Finally, when we do manage to kill ourselves to meet that cursed deadline, they forget about it and send a stinker at the end of the day for committing a gruesome crime- Why didn’t we remind them on time?:-)

· Why do the Presidents and VPs of the world suddenly wake up one fine afternoon and starts hallucinating and contemplating about their worth in this life and pester their PR agencies to send them all the best coverage that they were lucky to receive over the past 8 years within 60 mins. Are they so in secured? Or, do they think we are Gods to meet such a divine deadline

If it is all about positioning our work to the client as some Pro-client PR professional will like to argue then I would like to put it- Don’t we anyway do a lot of other work as an agency to prove to the client our expertise and efficiency.