Invitations

“I especially like invites from the PR (public relations) crowd. Most of them are friends and just like some of us in the news business, some of them can be a handful. As in nerve-racking handful.

Invitations. They’re funny things. I get loads of them some of the time. Like up to my ears in invites. Most are work-related and some are obviously a scam. You know the type, creole English from some guy ostensibly with royal relations having only recently inherited unspecified millions but requires your help and your bank account details. So, too, are the “Apple” guys requiring you to confirm their email by following a link the quickest possible time or risk having your account suspended or locked. I never bother but I know of people who do, and some of them are my friends, and boy, have they been haunted by regret ever since.

I especially like invites from the PR (public relations) crowd. Most of them are friends and just like some of us in the news business, some of them can be a handful. As in nerve-racking handful.

Consider the lot of one colleague, a news hen, who got invited to an early morning event at the Bonifacio Global City in Taguig and was rather late in coming to the appropriate address because she was caught in Manila’s legendary traffic, and therefore missed the communal ride that everyone else took. She would call the PR people whose kind hearts and gentle souls pushed heaven and earth to send a vehicle to fetch her. This was before the transport ogre known as Grab and the equally horrible two-wheeled torture machine spelled as Angkas was even thought of. The PR people would fetch the tardy news hen alright. But she was mortified when the vehicle finally showed up even later than she already was. Who came to fetch her was the motorcycle-riding security guard of the building where the event was being held at, with express instructions to carry out the retrieval as quickly as possible. She would mark those guys with a big red F on their foreheads for as long as she writes the business news, and let everyone and her uncle know that the red letter does not stand for friend.

There was the time also when another news hen was asked to wait for pick up at the appointed time and place and actually coming there well ahead of time, only to be told that the event had been postponed for some other time, a day after she was left standing at the curb in the early morning summer heat, like a jilted lover, unsure what was happening, and getting angrier by the minute when the knowledge that she’d been had finally hit her.

Some of us know of some in the news and entertainment business who are treated like royalty by PR people and I must confess that personally I have never been treated as shabbily by anyone.

There are those who are mighty irritating in the way they ask for favors but do not even bother to get a one-year subscription to our newspapers, or even say thank you. Yes, there are those people.

The most hateful are those who discriminate. They’re usually the in-house trumpeters of the various business groups whose often schoolmarmish PR division head’s idea of charm is to feed news people with cookies at one o’clock when everyone else has had their lunch. Gad, these guys don’t know that for as long as a good story or two can be made out of the event, the good journalist does not mind going hungry.

There are unwritten rules out there. The good PR knows it by heart and there are plenty of good PR in my experience. The best are usually those who were friends at the outset, the kind who would treat journalists fairly even in the absence of an established byline or when one is still a cub. But that list, sadly, is awfully short. I am tempted to name names if only to spite the bad ones. But I won’t. It is enough that I have their friendship. Friendship is enough reward.