Unless you’re a fellow career blogger—meaning you write one or more blogs for business, rather than just writing a personal blog on which you never generate any income—if I told you how many pitch emails I receive every day, you would think I’m exaggerating. But I’m not. Right now I write for eight different sites, and as a result I am pitched constantly. I would estimate that I receive about a hundred pitch emails every single day. Really.

And although most of the pitches are poorly written and even more poorly targeted, I don’t mind. This is how I sometimes find out about stuff I want to know. What I mind is poorly-written pitches, or thoughtless pitches, but the pitch itself is rarely the issue.

Recently, a kiwi changed how I think about the pitch process.

Okay; strictly speaking, that’s not true. The people behind the kiwi changed how I think about it.

First, some background: When you’re receiving upwards of one hundred pitches a day, and a good percentage of those are just simply awful (poorly written, addressed to the wrong person, or simply for products so heinous I can’t find the words), you have to find a way to inject some humor. Part of the way that I and a few colleagues do that is by maintaining something of a “dumb pitch” pool. When the most egregious offenders come in, we will often mail back and blind copy the other members of our circle. “Hi John,” we’ll reply. “Thanks so much for reaching out to me about hair plugs as a ‘fellow balding man.’ However, as I am neither male nor balding, I would appreciate it if you’d take me off of your list. Thanks.”

So a week or two ago, I got a pitch email about kiwi. Nothing wrong with kiwi, right? I like fruit as much as the next person. This email was really long—which I don’t love—and was also all about something called a spife, a combo spoon/knife specifically designed for kiwi. I was not as bowled over as I imagined I was supposed to be. But the kicker was that the email began:

Dear (Contact First Name),

Um. No.

I had a chuckle, but I just sort of disregarded the email because hey, everyone can have a bad day or make a mistake, right? No biggie.

Ten minutes later I got the same email again. And I thought that surely this was a resend with the name field corrected, but it wasn’t. It was a resend of the exact same email I’d just received. At which point I couldn’t resist mailing back.

I was really going to give you a pass on this one, [I wrote] the FIRST time I received it with “Dear (Contact First Name),” but twice is my limit, I’m afraid.

Thank you,
Mir

And then I forgot about it, because (sadly) this sort of thing really isn’t all that rare.

The next day I got an email back from the PR person who’d sent it, and I immediately felt like a complete ass, because she was so nice and so apologetic:

Mir:

Now where’s that spife…!

Generally when I mail a PR person back in response to a poorly-crafted pitch, I receive one of two reactions. Either they ignore me completely, or they argue with me about why I just don’t understand what they’re doing or why it doesn’t matter that they don’t know my name. This was not only unusual, it was completely human and threw me for a loop.

I mailed her back and thanked her for the response. And maybe chastised myself a bit for being kind of a jerk.

So, last week I was at BlogHer. And I went out on the Expo floor and walked around and talked to lots of PR folks, and wouldn’t you know it? There was a booth full of kiwis. So I got to talking to the two ladies there and we were knee-deep in conversation when we simultaneously realized that the infamous “Dear (Contact First Name)” exchange had occurred between us. I was standing there talking to the woman who’d sent me that email (rather, I learned, the woman whose intern had sent me that email—though notice she didn’t blame her intern when she mailed me back), and when we figured it out we laughed so hard we could barely speak.

She was initially embarrassed, I think, and so I leapt to assure her that her response—apologetic, kind, and utterly human—was the reason I hadn’t written her or her client off, and then I got to share stories of other PR folks who’ve responded to similar situations in unprofessional ways. And then she told me about her client.

Which is how I ended up spending a good chunk of time in the middle of the Expo floor, learning about kiwi growers in New Zealand, some of whom have never even heard of the Internet. I also tasted my very first gold kiwifruit (yes, with a spife!), and it was delicious.

People make mistakes. Good PR professionals recover from them, and forge real relationships, and are passionate about the products they represent. This woman who began her relationship with me with a mismanaged email can now call me up and pitch absolutely anything because I like her, and she’s clearly one of the Good Guys. It doesn’t mean I’ll love every product she puts in front of me, but it means she has my ear.

And for the record? Of all the conference swag I brought home, my kids have gone completely nuts over the spifes. (Spives?) We’re going grocery shopping today so we can buy more kiwi.