I'll be honest. I first got into journalism to piss people off. By people, I mean readers. Ok, maybe not enrage my audience to the point of receiving death threats, it was more to get people thinking, get them excited, especially since College A was lacking in everything other than, well, apathy.

But nowadays I'm not into exciting violence. And I think I'm a pretty fair and balanced person, maybe too much, since I don't really have staunch opinions on any issues anymore. Which is why I understand why my dad's a Republican. Which is why I left "Farenheit 911" with a bad taste in my mouth.

Which is why I don't understand why, on repeated occasions, my stories disintegrate into a war of the PR Demon Bitches.

Exhibit A/Winter 2003: A nasty e-mail, cc'd to my boss, from a PR woman irate over a reprinted faulty product write-up, who demanded we run her press release verbatim and in full as a makegood.

Exhibit B/Summer 2005: An angry voicemail from a PR woman regarding a faulty headline that I didn't write, although had she read past that she might've noticed that the actual story was correct.

Exhibit C/Fall 2005: An uncomfortable phone call, during which a stubborn CEO renegs on all the info his marketing manager openly gave me, says printing it equates to giving away all of his company's "secrets" - which, btw, are openly available to anyone who understands how Google works, as in full diagrams, explanation, everything, are right there on the Web, there's enough details for me to go build this "top secret, world-first" technology in my own fucking basement, but I'm not supposed to put it in my own words for the magazine? Fine.

I tried to explain, basically told him I'm not trying to screw him over, but what do you say to someone who thinks that you, as press, are trying to ruin his life?

(I'm a nice person, I swear.)