And then the PR guy called me “a fucking bitch”. I can’t even make this shit up.

What I read was this:

Shitty PR company does shitty job. Nothing special to see here, “90% of everything is CRUD.” Blogger sends self-important and condescending reply. Nothing to see here, I do similar things to head hunters, but ‘m honest about the fact that such things are all about me feeling clever, not about changing their world view.

PR company doesn’t see the lighter side of being talked down to. VP falls into trap created by shitty software design that makes “reply all” easy when it’s usually wrong. Says something that just about everyone says at one time or another. Email exchange follows, wherein both parties ignore each other’s reasonable points and behave badly.

Blogger decides to turn the “I’m important” knob to eleven, tweets about it, and then blogs about it, twice.

How does this become HN #1 the day after Steve Jobs died? HAVE WE LEARNT NOTHING?????????

Now I have read this story of a blogger I have never heard of and a company I don't care about. So, someone has pushed the wrong button and sent an insulting email out to everyone. Instead of "I'm sorry", there is some kind of flame war on Twitter, which nobody will remember tomorrow. It's not exactly what I would file under "deeply interesting".

I would have loved to read a story about kindness. Kindness is leet.

I don't think it's pointless. The fact is that if we're not careful it's easy for any of us to become assholes "just doing our job". Furthermore, the global connectivity has a homogenizing effect whereby if someone is successful by being an asshole, pretty much everyone else has to (or feels they have to) just to keep up. Therefore I'm always happy for someone with half-decent principles to come out in defiance of the status quo, even if it is pitchforks and torches. At least people still care.

And the most disturbing part is that the PR guy thinks that "PR firms and PR people ... are actually the livelihood of any journalist's business." Disturbing that he thinks it, and disturbing that it's actually true for some journalists.

He is, indeed, the only one in this story I didn't want to tell to get over his or herself.

(Question: is it "his or herself" or "him or herself"?)

As a random visitor/bystander, that part is great.

If I were her friend, however, I would have strongly advised against it. This is clearly her letting her ego take control in a tense situation, which is often not a good idea.

A stunt like that should have a purpose, and having some "faux VP" moron at a PR firm feel bad about himself shouldn't cross your threshold of usefulness, especially when you have no interest in maintaining a relationship with that PR firm.

Now perhaps the linkbait quality of the story, along with the entertainment value of her regular readership would make the "see how powerful I am" ->> twitterbomb tactic worthwhile, I don't know. I mean, I DID read the story and be entertained by it, but I doubt that my visit will offer the author any further value, since I am not her audience and now I have an under-informed picture who she is as a person.

Funny? Yes. Pathetic in its own way? Yes.

PR firms, managing your company's images, PR nightmares, Reply-all accidents. All of these seem potentially Startup-applicable, if not directly Hacker-applicable.

1. blogger gets a spam pitch from a PR company.

2. blogger sends standard snarky reply (minor celebrity collating paper)

3. VP at PR company accidentally reply-all some unkind words

4. blogger calls him out

5. VP pretends to apologize but really just questions her relevancy without PR firms feeding her stories to re-blog

6. blogger goes nuclear by tweeting the exchange to her 167K followers ('Please stand by for a demonstration of relevancy.')

7. hilarity ensues

After that, he continued to be rude and condescending. A PR firm. That can't do PR.

I don't think that the relevant implications have to be spelt out: The wrong PR shilling your company could earn you undeserved negativity. I.e. What if the pitch sent in this case was on your startup? As a result, your company gets dragged in, people (some of whom have never heard of you, could be potential clients, etc) develop negative associations with your brand. All because you had the misfortune to hire a PR firm with what you thought were skilled professionals.

I do believe you just cut yourself on Occam's razor.

> can people really be this stupid?

Yes. Always yes.

Bullet Tooth Tony once said, Never underestimate the predictability of stupidity, I have never heard it described more aptly.

I tweeted the link and I directly got email invite to some crap service for women. coincidence?

Ninety percent of anything is crap. But then there are the remaining ones and they are big, bigger than most people think: http://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html

Internet white knights are far more prevalent than you realize.