PR Etiquette

I have a problem with people touching me.

It's not a huge problem; I don't have an anxiety attack if someone touches my hand or something. It's just a professional problem. I find it comes up with PR people, because I work with them fairly regularly and I'm pretty friendly with most of them.

Friendly, but not friends, with the rare exception. (Very rare, like I knew them before I got a job or some such.) Here's the thing: I like shaking people's hands for work stuff. When I see a PR person, when I meet a source, when I see someone I see every month--shake the hand. Love it. A good, firm handshake, lots of smiling, lots of friendly remarks about how vacation was or whatnot.

The problem is when you get those PR people who want to hug everyone. That weirds me out. I recently ran into a PR person I'd only met once before and I got a hug from this person. There are some PR people who just do that--they meet you once and then hug you every time after.

I don't get it. It just doesn't seem professional at all. It seems like in business school they'd teach you not to hug people. They teach you how to interview and meet with clients, so surely they'd cover "hugging," too. I didn't go to business school, so maybe they don't cover this. Also, I bet a lot of PR people didn't go to business school either, so maybe they didn't get this fictional business etiquette class either. I'm not a particularly huggy person--I don't even really hug friends that I've known forever unless I haven't seen them in a long time and they live across the country. When PR people want to hug me, even if it's just a half hug, it makes me extremely uncomfortable.

Is this something that a human resources person at a company would cover? Under the same personal/business topics as dating within the office, spending company time on Facebook and sexual harassment at the office?

Is this in an episode of The Office?

(Also, I will post about the Red Sox game as soon as CVS fixes the photo CD I paid for. Cross your fingers.)