My first paying job out of high school was as a secretary to the Director of one of the biggest News Radio Stations in Athens. His name was Iannis Tzannetakos, a very well respected journalist in Greece, and he was my boyfriend’s step dad.
I will always be so grateful to him for the opportunity he gave me. It was the coolest job anyone could have ever asked for. I have incredible memories from those times. From meeting all kinds of politicians, that an average person would spend a lifetime never even passing by, to actually making friends with people you only get to see on TV, to meeting actors and musicians that came to be interviewed! Once I even got stuck in an elevator with a member of the parliament who was a Minister of the Cabinet, but then he started hitting on me and it stopped being cool really fast. They all used to hang out in my office before they met the Director, because, surprisingly, my office was bigger than his! I met so many well known people in the few months that I worked there. It was awesome!
When Iannis (he insisted on everyone calling him by his first name) first realized that I needed a little “help” coming out of my shell, he took it upon himself to do so. Once he asked me to go to the studio downstairs and tell the audio technicians that I was there to audition as a newscaster. Their job was to decide if I could do it. If that was the case, they would have to decide if my voice and style were good enough to read the news bulletins during the morning and noon shifts.
I was so scared! I think I sat there waiting for my turn, cursing the time I ever started working there, for a while. In my mind I was sure he was doing it to humiliate me and I was pretty mad at him.
When the sound techs were finally ready for me they handed me some huge headphones that I really had to try hard to keep on my head without tilting over. My hands were shaking so bad, I had to put the pages they handed me to read on my lap, so they wouldn’t notice. I was about to go into convulsions, when Ianni’s wife came to check on me. I heard her saying under her breath “He’s crazy! He wants me to try out too!”
I think that’s when I realized what his plan was. He was trying to find a reason to get rid of her because she was always hanging around the office doing nothing and it got to his nerves (yeah, they had that kind of relationship), so alas, he had sent her down to “check on me and keep me company”, wink, wink.
The idea alone was enough to cheer me up, so I was able to loosen up and read the part just fine. It was a stupid "scientific" article about bunnies, and I couldn’t exactly understand how that would be relevant with any of the current affairs I was supposed to be covering, but I quickly understood that all those technicians were interested in, was the pitch of my voice.
His wife refused to read the bunny article, so they gave her one about the weather. We were both deemed to have a “voice for the night” (I know, it sounds perverted, but I swear it was really innocent), but my schedule was in the morning, so I told them I couldn’t do it and ran out of there as fast as my feet could carry me. She on the other hand thought it was very flattering, so she stayed down there for a little longer, to my boss's delight, while I headed back on the 2nd floor to where my office was.
His second attempt to make me a little more social was when he sent me to help out the journalists who didn’t know how to type. I really wanted the ground to open underneath my feet and swallow me, after all I was a little star struck, but my wish was not granted. I knew they needed help, so I walked slowly towards them and said that Iannis had sent me to help them out.
So there I was, the one hailed as their savior, the girl that could type faster than they could. Things were crazy in there! They all worked around a really long table, papers laying scattered everywhere and a grey cloud of cigarette smoke looming over their heads like a death wish waiting to happen. The minute a big piece would hit the room everyone went immediately into a state of panic for a few seconds! Then the chief editor would twirl his moustache and give out assignments so that everyone had a part in the events they should cover, and things would settle down again.
They were always very busy and they were all working in a frantic manner. It was a news station, so they had reporters who read a 10 minute version of the news on the hour, every hour, and others who read the headline news every half an hour. So as you can well deduce, slow typing was not exactly much appreciated in a fast moving environment like that. I was their hero!
So I changed my schedule and came in early in the morning, around 7 am. At first I used to just sit at the long table and type a bunch of things that they would dictate to me. I also used to help them out when they couldn’t figure out how to use the fax machine or the copier. Later on I became more involved in writing some of the pieces, if they were ever short handed.
From 10-12pm I would help Ianni with his stuff. Typing press releases about an upcoming program or guest, preparing reports from information I pulled out of the statistics Nielsen Media Research used to send to us, mostly about the popularity of the station compared to others, or taking notes on his funny (rolling down on the floor funny) bulletins he had me type every now and then, about the correct way to do and say things while on the air.
From 12-3pm I had to return to the “smoking” table and help them out with the first long news report of the day that all the big gun journalists had worked on for hours. There were interviews, special reports, breaking news etc.
It was there that I met Tito. Titos Kontopoulos was probably 8-9 years older than me and he was sharp as a whip. He covered the reports from the Ministry of Defense and he was very good at it. Everybody said he had great potential. You could always count on him to be on time, brief and on the subject, something the chief editors loved! He was a timid and quiet man, and he did his job silently and for the most part kept to himself. I guess we both recognized the kindred spirit within us, and soon the 2 of us had become the “jokers” of the Station. Weird, I know!
We used to cut and paste the funniest articles we could find while scanning through the newspapers every morning, as it was part of our job. We always found the funniest things in the newspapers that belonged to the extreme right wing, and we used to tape them on the wall, right on top of the fax/copier machine. Things like: "The whole nation demands for the King to return to power!" or "Constantinopole will be our capital once again!", stuff like that! Then we would wait to see peoples' reactions as they read them while getting their copies. It was a riot!
After a while the rest of the journalist were on to us, so the right wing guys started doing the same on their part of the wall, using of course articles clipped from the extreme left wing newspapers, so pretty soon it had turned into an all out battle! Who’s going to have the funniest piece on their wall today? It was hilarious!
Soon it was Christmas, and Titos left for his vacation. When he came back a few weeks later however we all noticed that he had started wearing hats a lot, something that he never used to do before. He was different. He went back to being reserved and quiet, he kept to himself and he chose to sit at a desk away from everybody else. Pretty soon the jokes died out, but we all remembered the good old days of the “funny news war” as we called them.
One day I got to work very early. The bus drivers were on strike (it happens a lot there), so I had to get up early and fight my way to a cab. Titos was the only one there and I saw him putting his head down and wiping tears from his face as soon as I walked in the room. I wasn’t sure if I should talk to him or not, he was always so private, but I was really worried about him, and I decided to ask him what was wrong. He still had his hat on and he raised his hands and pointed to his head. “I lost all my hair” he whispered. “I have alopecia because of the stress, my hair is all gone!”
I felt so sorry for him. He used to have beautiful thick hair, and he was taking it pretty hard. I asked him if this would be permanent. “No, it will grow back!” he said sadly. “Oh, come on, it will be all right then!” I tried to cheer him up a bit. I went down on the first floor to get his morning coffee and croissant, and after a few words of encouragement and a pat on the back we both started working again, not mentioning it ever again. Not too long after this incident he decided to start working more on outside assignments, so he didn’t have to face all those people in the office. We all understood, but we all missed him.
A few months later, Iannis resigned from directing the station and a bunch of the journalists that were his friends followed him. I wanted to leave too but he asked me to stay. He knew that they were going to fire everybody that had been hired by him anyway, so he advised me to stay and take the severance they would have to pay me. It wasn’t too long after that and, just like he said, I was fired along with others that had gotten their jobs through him. That’s how things roll in Greece.
A few weeks later Iannis asked me to join him to the next radio station he was hired to be the Director (by that time he couldn’t find his own glasses without me!) but I decided it was time for me to start college full time, so I passed.
Years later I was at my sister’s house visiting. She had a pile of her students’ homework she needed to correct on her desk (she’s an ESL teacher), and my eye caught the name of the student on the first paper. “Titos Kontopoulos!” No way, I thought. I asked my sister and after an exchange of information we decided it must be the same guy! “You’re his teacher? How weird is that? Does he have hair?” I asked. My sister thought I was joking about his thick hair. “Yeah, he has hair, tons of it.” Good, I thought to my self.
I never saw Tito again, but a few years ago as I was reading the news on a Greek webiste, I found this:
Titos Kontopoulos dies, aged 45
Politicians and journalists yesterday paid tribute to Titos Kontopoulos, a respected reporter on political and defense affairs, who died on Saturday at the age of 45 in London, where he had been undergoing treatment for cancer. Defense Minister Evangelos Meimarakis described Kontopoulos as “a fighter, just and serious... a real master of his subject.” Kontopoulos had been working for the Ethnos newspaper.
I was deeply saddened to hear the news, but of course life went on, as it usually does. I thought of him again yesterday, while Brian and I were talking about our experience at the wig shop.
Now that I think about it I’m not sure if he indeed had alopecia due to stress, as he had claimed, or if he was going through chemo and never told anybody. I had never put two and two together until yesterday!
And you want to know something spooky? When I started writing this I had no idea of the exact day he died, so when I googled his name and I found the article I posted above, I noticed it was published on 4/25/06! Three years ago to the day! Yikes!
Not to mention that I did feel a weird breeze behind me and my hair at the back of my head did stand up at some point while I was typing. I’m kidding you not!
Mama mia! I better call the ghost hunting plumbers on Sci-Fi Channel and report my paranormal experience.
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