Pensive thoughts on today
Sep. 11th, 2006 05:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mmcnealyThe baby is down for another nap so I finally have time to write about today.
Five years ago I was in Seattle working for a subsiderary insurance company of GE. I was a business analyst in the Investment department and was working on a system to track the derivatives and the securities that they were attached to for FASB 133. I woke up early to get ready for work. It was a Tuesday, a beautiful sunny end of summer day with just the hint of fall in the breeze. The alarm clock went off and then the radio switched on, the announcer said something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center, and I thought "Oh, its just a Cessna", switched the radio off and put in a CD to wake me up faster. Probably was something with a dancey techno beat.
I got ready quickly, grabbed my breakfast and lunch out of the fridge and dashed through the living room. My grandma was watching the TV, "Did you hear?" she said "A plane has hit the World Trade Center!" "Yah, I heard, a Cessna" and I was out the door and sprinting up the street to the bus stop.
As I was waiting for the bus, I was thinking about whether or not I'd see this tall, cute Navy guy at church that night, and whether or not there would be anything further between us. We'd met the Tuesday before and had a wonderful time chatting at the singles' group social hour at Red Robins after the meeting.
My cell phone rang, it was my Mom. "Hi Mom, what's up?" "Did you hear? A plane has hit the World Trade Center!"
"Yah I know Mom, a Cessna"
"No, a 757" ..... "OMG! Another plane just hit the other tower!"
A heavy weight settled into my chest and all the life seemed to flow out of my body and into the pavement. The bus arrived and I got on in shock. No one was talking, it was the quietest bus ride I've ever been on.
When I got to work, the floor was very quiet, and I went over to the Trader's desk area where they had the big TV screens. "One of the towers just fell" said my friend D in a quiet voice. Everyone was in shock, just staring at the screens.
I went to my desk, turned on my computer and just sat there. My boss came by, "I know so many people who worked in those towers, I wonder how many made it out" "I almost took a job in a firm in one of them too, instead I came here" and he passed onto his office deep in thought.
I spent the rest of the day in shock at my computer, watching MSNBC live streaming video. My meetings were canceled and no work got done. The rest of the week was pretty much the same for everyone.
Our custodian was Deutsche Banc, they were in 7 World Trade Center, and their building was almost completely destroyed when 1 or 2 World Trade Center had fallen on it. I wondered where our rep George was, nobody knew. Ordinarily I couldn't have given two straws about the guy, because he had a face like a salmon and was pretty useless as a rep. I called the people at DB that I knew in New Jersey, "Have you heard from George yet?" "Was he at the main office that day?" Nobody knew. Finally 3 days later, he called the office. He had been at the Jersey office at an unexpected meeting that morning.
I kep thinking, "If I had the same job I have now, but in NYC, I would have been in those towers". I kept finding articles about people who died or had spouses named Marion, it was really freaky as its not a common name. I thought back to when I had been there on a business trip in 1998, and had taken pictures of the towers and the beautiful glass attrium right by the marina. Now it was all rubble.
The rest of that Fall is a blur. They decided to move the office from Seattle to Stamford, CT; even though they promissed that they wouldn't. Turns out that the head boss had come in two years before with a promise to his boss to get the Seattle office in shape and move it back East, but he lied and told folks that he wasn't. I was tired of Seattle, and wanted a change of scene, so I let it be known that I wanted to move. A lot of people decided not to move there after the terrorism attacks and then the anthrax mailngs and so by the next summer, a very few people had moved, and lots more had stayed in Seattle and found jobs elsewhere.
The cute, tall Navy guy came back to church two weeks after 9/11, they had been on heightened alert and out patrolling the harbor all that time. After almost getting a chance to talk to each other for over a month, we finally got a chance on a group social to a pumpkin patch. The next night, after church, he sat next to me at the hymn sing. The next week, my two best friends set him up with all three of my phone numbers and my email, and he called and asked me out on a date for Saturday night, November 3rd, 2001.
Nine months later, to the day, we were married on August 3rd, 2002. Four years and several days later, our little son Henry was born.
Now its been 5 years since 9/11/01, and my life has changed so much, yet I still think about that day, standing at the bus stop in shock at the news.
Five years ago I was in Seattle working for a subsiderary insurance company of GE. I was a business analyst in the Investment department and was working on a system to track the derivatives and the securities that they were attached to for FASB 133. I woke up early to get ready for work. It was a Tuesday, a beautiful sunny end of summer day with just the hint of fall in the breeze. The alarm clock went off and then the radio switched on, the announcer said something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center, and I thought "Oh, its just a Cessna", switched the radio off and put in a CD to wake me up faster. Probably was something with a dancey techno beat.
I got ready quickly, grabbed my breakfast and lunch out of the fridge and dashed through the living room. My grandma was watching the TV, "Did you hear?" she said "A plane has hit the World Trade Center!" "Yah, I heard, a Cessna" and I was out the door and sprinting up the street to the bus stop.
As I was waiting for the bus, I was thinking about whether or not I'd see this tall, cute Navy guy at church that night, and whether or not there would be anything further between us. We'd met the Tuesday before and had a wonderful time chatting at the singles' group social hour at Red Robins after the meeting.
My cell phone rang, it was my Mom. "Hi Mom, what's up?" "Did you hear? A plane has hit the World Trade Center!"
"Yah I know Mom, a Cessna"
"No, a 757" ..... "OMG! Another plane just hit the other tower!"
A heavy weight settled into my chest and all the life seemed to flow out of my body and into the pavement. The bus arrived and I got on in shock. No one was talking, it was the quietest bus ride I've ever been on.
When I got to work, the floor was very quiet, and I went over to the Trader's desk area where they had the big TV screens. "One of the towers just fell" said my friend D in a quiet voice. Everyone was in shock, just staring at the screens.
I went to my desk, turned on my computer and just sat there. My boss came by, "I know so many people who worked in those towers, I wonder how many made it out" "I almost took a job in a firm in one of them too, instead I came here" and he passed onto his office deep in thought.
I spent the rest of the day in shock at my computer, watching MSNBC live streaming video. My meetings were canceled and no work got done. The rest of the week was pretty much the same for everyone.
Our custodian was Deutsche Banc, they were in 7 World Trade Center, and their building was almost completely destroyed when 1 or 2 World Trade Center had fallen on it. I wondered where our rep George was, nobody knew. Ordinarily I couldn't have given two straws about the guy, because he had a face like a salmon and was pretty useless as a rep. I called the people at DB that I knew in New Jersey, "Have you heard from George yet?" "Was he at the main office that day?" Nobody knew. Finally 3 days later, he called the office. He had been at the Jersey office at an unexpected meeting that morning.
I kep thinking, "If I had the same job I have now, but in NYC, I would have been in those towers". I kept finding articles about people who died or had spouses named Marion, it was really freaky as its not a common name. I thought back to when I had been there on a business trip in 1998, and had taken pictures of the towers and the beautiful glass attrium right by the marina. Now it was all rubble.
The rest of that Fall is a blur. They decided to move the office from Seattle to Stamford, CT; even though they promissed that they wouldn't. Turns out that the head boss had come in two years before with a promise to his boss to get the Seattle office in shape and move it back East, but he lied and told folks that he wasn't. I was tired of Seattle, and wanted a change of scene, so I let it be known that I wanted to move. A lot of people decided not to move there after the terrorism attacks and then the anthrax mailngs and so by the next summer, a very few people had moved, and lots more had stayed in Seattle and found jobs elsewhere.
The cute, tall Navy guy came back to church two weeks after 9/11, they had been on heightened alert and out patrolling the harbor all that time. After almost getting a chance to talk to each other for over a month, we finally got a chance on a group social to a pumpkin patch. The next night, after church, he sat next to me at the hymn sing. The next week, my two best friends set him up with all three of my phone numbers and my email, and he called and asked me out on a date for Saturday night, November 3rd, 2001.
Nine months later, to the day, we were married on August 3rd, 2002. Four years and several days later, our little son Henry was born.
Now its been 5 years since 9/11/01, and my life has changed so much, yet I still think about that day, standing at the bus stop in shock at the news.
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(no subject)
Date: 2006-09-11 11:21 pm (UTC)By the time I heard it was announced as an attack. I still remember the DJ's controlled tone with an eerie freshness, and Javi flicking off the radio and turned on the TV.
I watched the first tower fall, went school in default mode (like you) and heard about the 2nd tower on my way. They canceled classes that day but my 8 am lab instructor was too dense to check. He hadn't heard about the attacks until we told him. He made us sit there in a reception-less basement, not having any clue if the world was coming down around us. The ignorance was terrifying with the early reports of attack on the Capital Building. San Francisco is a scary place to be at a time like that - there is potentially no easy way out.
You must think about 9/11 with such charged emotions - so much for you hinged around that day. A year later my husband joined the Army because of those attacks. We share that, in a way.