Well, it's been an interesting couple of days — I wrote a fairly innocuous story about how a number of online polls run by Telstra showed embarrassing results for the telco, and that triggered an avalanche of angry emails from one of their PR minders.

I've written up the extraordinary dialogue on apcmag.com as a followup.

The guy, Rod Bruem, accused me of being involved in rigging the poll results, or knowing who did, being 'dishonest' because I didn't give him a headsup that I was writing the story (I had contacted him in advance to get some basic info about the Telstra website in question but didn't lay the whole story out for him because I didn't need any further information and also assumed Telstra would stand behind its own research data) and that I wasn't a journalist (full stop.)

All I can say is that this "PR" guy needs to really needs to drink a nice cup of STFU (though I suppose I should thank him for giving me a great followup story.)

As one of my colleagues observed, in recent years, Telstra seems to have missed the fundamental principle that you catch more flies with honey than you do with vinegar… (and yes, for the purposes of the equation, I am the fly in Telstra's ointment.)