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After reading Tuesday's post on Apple unresponsive PR department, a tipster sent us the following juicy tidbit about the miserable life of Apple's PR staff. Apparently, they're kept almost as unenlightened as the press they work so hard to keep away. And a social life? Forget about it. More after the jump:

I never ran this myself, but through a friend of a friend I heard that Apple PR teams are not allowed to communicate internally with one another, i.e. the iPod PR people are not allowed to know what iMac PR people are up to. It is totally divide-and-conquer inside the company.

Externally, you're also not supposed to cultivate relationships with journalists. It's the complete opposite of other vendors. In fact, my friend said, if you're an Apple PR person and you are seen in the company of a journalist, at a party or any place other than an Apple event, you better have a good reason why.

The whole "friend of a friend" aspect has us wary, so we called and checked with Steve Dowling, the head of corporate PR for Apple. Or rather, we left a voicemail for him. As you can probably guess, Apple has not yet returned calls for comment.