April 1, 2002

Secrets of DCGreeks.com Revealed!!!

Five secrets so huge, it'll make you question everything you thought you knew about DCGreeks.com!

1. We're Pappas!... Many of you have seen and commented on the member profile for a guy named "Pappas." Just as many of you think that there's no way this guy could be real. Well, you're right. We originally created Pappas in the first few weeks of the site, when we noticed that at the time, the guy to girl ratio on DCGreeks.com was an overwhelming 70% guys to 30% girls. We knew that for the website to survive as a place where both guys and girls could meet each other, we needed more girls to register. Therefore we created "Pappas," a too-good-to-be-true, seemingly sensitive, attractive, doctor-type that the ladies would surely want to get to know. (It's no accident that Pappas is a pediatrician, hinting that not only does he like children, but that he would be good with them as well.) Well, it worked. Women started writing him like crazy, and therefore he was single-handedly responsible for most of the female traffic on the site and increased registration by women. On April 1, 2002, our membership stands at 113 female members and 131 male members, and up until recently was almost even in terms of guys and girls registered. Seeing that our little rouse had worked and Pappas had served his purpose, we needed to get a good cover story when people started asking why they'd never met the guy and had never seen him around. Some women even asked us if we could get him to do our bachelor/bachelerotte auction. So that's why we had Pappas move to Chicago, to get rid of the expectation of seeing him around at Greek events.

By the way, we're also Hot Rooster, Happening Hen, Steamy Serpent, Ihategreeks, Ladies-Luvin Lambrinos, and Polizoumeri. There's no real strategic reason for why we created these aliases. We were just bored and have way too much time on our hands. 

2. We Charge Money to Set DCGreeks.com Members up on Dates… Forget that crazy thea who set up your parents. It's 2002 and she's just not getting the job done. If you really want to meet someone, talk to us. Since the site has been up, we've set up dozens of your friends in the area, at only a fraction of what you might expect for such a service. If no one in the immediate DC area catches your eye, don't worry, because we've got incredible connections with Baltimore and Tidewater. Just go to our photos section, and if you see someone you like, we'll make it happen. All you need to do is tell us who you want to meet, you don't even have to know their name, because well, we know everyone. 

3. When a Guy Writes a Girl on DCGreeks.com and She Doesn't Reply, it's Because The Guys @ DCGreeks.com Have Deleted the Message… The converse of this is true as well - when girls write guys on DCGreeks.com and the guys don't reply, it's because we've deleted the message. We constantly monitor every member message that goes over the site. In some instances where we notice a guy writing a girl, or vice versa, especially when for some reason we wouldn't want to see them get together, we'll delete the message. We haven't been able to figure out how to delete these messages without the mail notification going out, so the end result is a an email telling the guy or the girl to go to his or her or DCGreeks.com inbox, only to find nothing there. Sometimes a message will sneak through our radar screen, especially when a guy decides to write every girl on the site. 

4. We Take Pictures of People at Greek Nights and Sell them to Fashion Catalogs… If you honestly believe that we like going around taking pictures of people at Greek Nights, and that we just post these pictures for everyone to look at free of charge, you're crazy. Taking pictures often keeps us from enjoying ourselves at these events. More often than not we'd rather just be hanging out, instead of working the room taking pictures of everyone. So we couldn't possibly be doing this for free. This also explains why there are more pictures of girls on the site than guys, because catalogs pay top dollar for girls in real world settings wearing clothes purchased at their stores. Let's face it, Greek guys wear pretty basic stuff at Greek Nights, but the ladies come dressed to impress. 

5. There Once was a Girl @ DCGreeks.com… It's a little known fact that in the beginning there was actually a Girl @ DCGreeks.com, D.P., who founded the site with us, but she disappeared a few days before our July launch. Actually D.P. was the one who originally came up with the idea to start DCGreeks.com. She was tired of only meeting the Greek guys who would hit on her while she was manning the cash register at her parents' restaurant. She was actually in grad school at the time studying for a degree that she claimed most Greek guys found incredibly intimidating, and she'd only go to the restaurant to help out on rare occasions, usually on Saturday mornings after Greek Nights, when the regular staff would take the morning off to recover. She wanted to meet a nice, down-to-earth Greek guy, and figured that if a Greek guy had internet access, that the chances were high that he might be a professional. She longed to escape the restaurant business. Even though the money her parents made from the restaurant put her through a small Virginia liberal arts college, D.P. felt like the restaurant business limited her plans for the future. 
So what happened to D.P. you ask? A couple of weeks before the site launched last summer, she had taken a few weeks to travel to the Greek Islands. We asked her that for the sake of consistency on our respective Meet the Guys and Girl profiles on the site, to go to Thirassia, off the coast of Santorini, to have her picture taken on a donkey, like the rest of us had the summer before. We got an email from her that she sent from an Internet café on Santorini. 

Hey Guys, Hope preparations for the website are going well. I'm sure you guys are doing a great job putting together the finishing touches. It's my confidence in you that makes what I'm about to say and do that much easier. You're going to have to launch the website without me. I'm not coming back. I was on Thirassia on one of those donkeys you guys are so fond of, when a guy on the next donkey, seeing my camera around my neck, tapped me on the shoulder and offered to take my picture. He was the most beautiful man I had ever met. We spent the rest of the day together, including witnessing the most amazing sunset back on Santorini. He's a former MBA student from Chicago who dropped out after his first year to move to Santorini to pursue his dream of opening a psarotaverna and living a much simpler life. He's asked me to stay with him on the island and I said yes. I know it's crazy and so unlike me, but this just feels right.  Good luck with everything,  D.P.

D.P., the original Girl @ DCGreeks.com