Cortana is my sleepless personal assistant – how she deals with the Greek media :-)

Over the last few days, there has been a bit of media noise in Greece around my name. Two articles were published about my path from Petinos (the little village where I grew up), my graduate studies and research career in the UK, and my current role at Microsoft. I had no idea about the interest the articles would generate when I agreed to give the interviews. Many people reached out with positive messages. I am very thankful. I can’t possibly respond to everyone.

• Soul magazine (part of AthensVoice). Great write up by Stefanos Tsitsopoulos. He’s the best. I gave this interview back in April but Stefanos waited until after the summer to publish it.
• “Έθνος της Κυριακής” newspaper. This is a shorter interview, with a similar narrative as above.

I liked Stefanos’ article the best. He knows my passion about music and live concerts so he made sure to highlight that aspect of Seattle, which I love.

In addition to all the messages, I received invitations from major TV networks in Greece to do live interviews. Given that I didn’t want to jump from one TV channel to the next in a short period of time or to have to choose one of them, I decided to decline all of them, at least for now 🙂 When the noise from the articles subsides, I’ll revisit the decision.

The people from the Greek TV stations haven’t been considering the time difference between Greece and Seattle (it’s -10h), so they’ve been calling me in the middle of the night for the last three nights (around 1-4am). Thanks to Cortana, however, my sleep was never disrupted. Cortana learns (or allows me to define) my “quiet hours.” At those times, she doesn’t let calls through from people who aren’t in my “inner circle” or meet certain conditions. She just directs them to my voicemail. Isn’t this great? 🙂