Five years
I had arrived at work early, a little after 7. I was quite happily editing away, when really confused-looking coworkers started showing up. They'd been listening to the radio on their drive in, and no one could make sense of what the announcers were saying. Planes falling out of the skies? What the hell was going on? At first we thought it was some kind of a sick joke. We all tried to log on to CBC.ca and CNN.com to see what was happening, but it seemed that everyone in the world was thinking the same thing at that moment. All of the news sites were down. I had an illicit copy of MSN messenger on my computer, and figured now was as good a time as any to use it on company time. I logged in and asked Tim if he knew anything more. My primary concern was that nothing was happening on the west coast. By this time, both towers had been hit, as had the Pentagon, and the passengers of United 93 were preparing to sacrifice themselves to avoid another target.
It was pretty easy to see that no more work was going to be done that day. We all sat in the conference room on the second floor, our eyes glued to the grainy antenna image we could pick up on the television normally reserved for teleconferences. We watched as people trapped above the crash site waved out of the windows. We watched as the second, and then the first, tower collapsed. We watched as people emerged from the giant dust cloud, covered in the shrapnel. We watched, helpless to do anything but gasp in disbelief.
Comments
I had just started a week of vacation, and had intended to sleep in that morning when a phone call from Tim woke me up. Tim told me to turn on the TV so I grabbed the remote from my bedside table and switched on the TV in my bedroom. It was surreal.
It wasn't much of a vacation from that point on. I spent most of it doing stupid meaningless tasks in an effort to try and do something, anything, while all of this was going on and in the aftermath. It didn't feel right to be on vacation given what I had watched happen. So I logged in to work, and gave some random direction to my already competent team about how to handle the increased load on our web sites as a result of people wanting to learn more about the attacks and then the temporary shutdown of the stock market and the the subsequent re-opening of the stock market. And then I went and donated blood for the first time ever. All the rest of my vacation time was spent pretty much glued to the TV set and internet, trying to make sense of everything that had happened and not being successful, and not even being able to imagine what the people directly impacted by the attack must have been feeling if this was how I was feeling out here on the west coast.
Posted by: heather at September 11, 2006 04:51 PM
As an afterthought. I've always wondered, as I was growing up, what event would take place in my lifetime that I would remember exactly what I was doing when it happened. The way you hear our parents talking about where they were and what they were doing when the learned that JFK had been assasinated. Or John Lennon. Or when Neil Armstrong took his first step on the moon.
Now I know what at least one of them is.
I wonder if Bobbin will wonder what "the event" will be in her lifetime as she's growing up. And when it happens, I hope it's a positive one that she'll remember with excitement. And not one that brings tears to her eyes.
Posted by: heather at September 11, 2006 04:55 PM