Ok. Imagine the person you love most love in your life has died suddenly in a horrific accident.

It's senseless. Arbitrary. In the morning you say bye and disappear off to work and then sometime during the day you get a phonecall, or a police officer comes to your office to tell you the terrible news. The person you love is dead. It's all you can do to get your head around it. How can it be? You saw them an hour ago. They must have made a mistake. It's someone else.

But it's not.

You go home, and in amongst having to give information to the officers, identify a body and begin to think about funeral arrangements, the doorbell goes. And it's a reporter for your local paper who wants to interview you. Just wondering if they could have a few words - and a picture of your loved one - for a tribute in the paper.

What would you do?

Personally I'd definitely slam the door in their face and tell them to fuck off.

Depending on how soon afterwards it was, I'd be tempted to smack them in the face for good measure.

Luckily that's never happened to me.

The part of my job I hate the most is death knocks (yup, horrible name for them, but that's what they are). Now, these are different from obituaries, which usually come later, when people are beginning to deal with their grief. Death knocks are pure, raw emotion. People like my SO - who has a tendency to believe most reporters are media spivs - highlight them as one of the things that show how much we love to suck into other people's misery. It's not quite like that, but the nature of knocking on someone's door in that situation does make me feel pretty scummy.

I've been very lucky with the death knocks I've done since I started at the paper. Of the half dozen I've been sent out on (mostly kids, which makes it worse), five have had people who wanted to speak to me either immediately or not long after, and the final one was a man who just told me to go away. But every time there's that moment when you're standing on the doorstep taking a deep breath about to ring the bell wondering how the hell you're going to find the words to explain why you're bothering them at a time when their world feels like it's ending. My more experienced colleagues say it gets easier with time, but it hasn't for me yet - although I suppose the first one I did I was so choked up I could hardly ask the poor kid's family my questions, so maybe it is getting better slowly.

Last night a 12-year-old girl was killed in a car accident on her way home from school. In our editorial meeting we had a debate over when it was appropriate to death knock and - thankfully - it was decided I should wait until tomorrow morning to go out there. I've just gotten home after a 14 hour day, I have to get up in 9 hours to go to work again and my first stop has to be this poor girl's house.

I love my job, but sometimes I hate my job.