The other day, a PR friend of mine called me up. She'd been fired. (No, this isn't about a restaurant client, stop trying to guess, sheesh.)

"You're a visionary," she said.

"Uh, OK. Sure, I'll go with that." (Far be it from me to disagree with a statement like that.)

"I was just fired from Client X. They told me it wasn't me, it was just that PR didn't make sense any more.  They meant media relations, you know, there aren't that many journalists left, it seems.  But they knew, they knew."

"What?  What did they know?" I asked, hoping that my brilliance would be revealed in the answer so I could agree with her more.

"They knew that spending all that money on me chasing around media stories isn't cost effective.  It's a crapshoot. No, it is a really bad run at the craps table.  It doesn't work," she said. "And you are not gonna believe this, they actually said they knew they were wasting my time. That I probably could do great work for them, that I was smarter than what they charged me to do."

"Wow. So your client knows you can do more than forward emails, take dictation and assemble a monthly report?  That's revolutionary, in my book."