I remember where I was on 9-11.
I'd worked at AIN Plastics for five years, leaving in March 2001 to join Jubilee Tech and sell linguistic services. My AIN boss, Brian Inman, had died of lung cancer, leaving a wife and three boys. His funeral had been the day before.
I was at my desk at work. Business had slowed down as the tech bubble popped and there wasn't much for me to do; the company had been laying people off all summer. Josh was in school. Diana and a friend of hers had left early in the morning to go to some pro-life thing in Washington DC; since she was travelling and I wasn't, she had my cell phone.
When the first plane hit, I assumed it was some idiot in a Cessna who'd done something fatally stupid. When the second plane hit, it sounded as if there was only one plane, with confused reports on which tower it hit. When it finally became clear that it really was two planes, two airliners that had been hijacked and deliberately crashed, most of our staff gathered in the lunch room to watch the TV. I went back to my desk and started trying to call Diana. All lines busy. Redial. The news said maybe 50,000 killed. All lines busy. Redial, redial, redial, redial. Meanwhile I was trying to get to CNN.com or any news site, and they were overloaded. Emailed a friend of mine who lived near DC, in case Diana needed to go to ground there; yes, he said. Meanwhile...Norfolk is a major Navy base; whoever launched this attack has to know that our carriers and Marines will going after them. Unless the attackers do something about it first. Radiological attack? That's what I would do. No word of that, but I was sitting there for a long time, wondering if I needed to just go get Josh out of school and head west. Finally, after 45 minutes of continuously hitting redial, I got through to Diana--she was in DC but hadn't gone past the Pentagon, hadn't seen the crash there, she was okay. Eventually it was clear that the only attack was the four planes; it was ultimately a symbolic attack rather than a strategic one.
And I couldn't help think the events of 9-11 would overshadow our loss of Brian.
Sunday, September 11, 2011
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2 comments:
I remember first hearing about it. A lot of us were asleep down under when it happened. Getting up for school next day, 6am, I turned on the radio: 105.1, Triple M Rock. Now, the lads at Triple M are just the kind to try to enliven our mornings with practical joking fun. I remember flying down the hallway to my brother's room: "Chris! Come here the trick they're playing on Triple M! It's a fake broadcast, like War of The Worlds, they're saying there's been a massive terrorist attack in the US, hahah, come quick, listen!"
We listened to bits and pieces of the broadcast as we went about getting ready for school. On the bus, we found out it wasn't a joke, but it still hadn't sunk in. All the kids at school in the morning classes were pulling faux "minute silences" in order to get out of doing work, until we were called to assembly, some of the horror sunk in, and we had a minute of remembrance for real. English class was spent watching the footage. Any kid who'd ever been to NYC was pumped for knowledge, anyone who had relatives or friends in the US was anxiously consulted. But, actually, I distinctly remember the night of the first attack on Iraw feeling much more real.
*"hear" - my teryaki chicken's getting in the way of spelling.
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