Fabulous?

Public Relations - swanky club openings, London Fashion Week, free champagne and so on, sounds fabulous right? But there is a down side. When working in public relations you constantly find yourself needing to impress someone more important than you, be it a journalist, a celebrity, a designer or even another PR agent. There's no point in denying it, successfully working in Public Relations is having the ability to suck-up to people shamelessly and relentlessly in order to get whatever your boss or client wants. The glamour is there by all means, but fabulous parties get a bit wearing when you are attending three a week, unable to fully enjoy the free drinks, due to the fact that you didn't have time to eat and have to be at work at 9am the following morning. But we're in PR baby, and that means that you do it all with a smile on your face and a pole up your arse. As I overheard one colleague telling another during my work placement in PR, "when you're at an event you keep your head up, your tummy tucked in and try not to look bored." This experience has got me thinking about the reputation Public Relations and the people who work in it has. 'Spin-doctors', 'sell-outs', 'bitches'. I've never considered these to be fair viewpoints but the more I learn the more I begin to realise that PR is not all it's cracked up to be. Sex and the City's Samantha Jones gave us a taste of the life we wanted but the reality is something quite different. Fabulous? I think not!