September 11, 2001

From BunzWiki

The fifth anniversary of 9/11 is approaching. I had started blogging a few months before, so my real-time thoughts were recorded, but my overall impression of that day was not.

I was at work in the basement of an office building, getting started with my day, when I first heard about the attack. I don't remember how I heard about it the very first time, but when my wife called from her assignment in Cincinnati, I already knew about it. After we talked, I logged onto LambdaMOO to chat with others and try to find out more of what was going on. The news websites were not easy to reach, we didn't have TV in the basement, and our building had gone into lockdown mode so my friends were the only connection I had to what was happening. At some point I did manage to find an IRC channel that was broadcasting the captions as they were displayed on CNN.

I was in a public room on Lambda, and someone said that a plane had just hit the Pentagon. I remember my response clearly: "That's not funny, don't even say stuff like that." I was sure he was kidding - how could the Pentagon have been attacked? I eventually came to believe that he was telling the truth. All of us wondered about the fate of several friends who lived in New York, including one who worked on Wall Street. I found out later that he was taking a two-week vacation and had been at home that morning.

Throughout the morning, there were scares all over the nation's capital. I heard about a car bomb in front of the State Department (presumably the round building in Georgetown), some type of attack at the Capitol, and of course numerous reports of the White House being in danger. My building was about four blocks from the White House, so those reports added to my feeling of terror. All morning I was sick to my stomach, unable to focus on anything - I spent the entire time trying to find out from the Internet what was going on. I have no memory of what my co-workers were doing on that day; I do remember they went back to normal the next day while I continued to sit at my desk unable to work from the terror.

I was working in a teleconferencing company at the time, and part of my responsibilities included being an operator for conferences. The phone lines were jammed for much of the day, so many conferences were canceled because of that - most not even officially, but the participants simply never called in. One woman, though, did show up on my conferencing board. I put on my headset and asked what she was there for, and she said she was waiting for a teleconference. I explained that it was canceled and asked if she had heard what was happening - she hadn't. I had to tell her to turn on the news so she could find out.

The news of the Twin Tower collapse struck me like a punch in the gut. I was utterly stunned. They had been built eight years before I was born, so for me they had been there since time immemorial - in fact, I wrote exactly that on my blog, that they couldn't be gone because they'd been there "forever." I had been visiting New York frequently for about a year and a half prior to the attacks, and I remembered a walk along the Hudson when I saw a helicopter hovering about two-thirds of the way up the tower; I was amazed that the buildings were so tall that a helicopter could be well below their roofs and still not hit any other buildings.

I desperately wanted to go home all day on 9/11. I had no way to actually get home, because the Metro had been shut down in the mid-morning, but all I wanted to do was curl up on the bed and stare at the TV all day. We had dial-up Internet access at work, so I couldn't watch any video of what was happening. I wanted my wife to be there with me, instead of in Cincinnati; due to the shutdown of all air travel she ended up driving ten hours in a rental car because it was the only way she could get home. I was glad she did, though, because I was alone in the house and I couldn't bear the thought that she wasn't beside me.

I eventually left for home around 4:30pm, only about an hour before I would normally have left. The Metro had been reopened for a couple of hours, but my boss wouldn't let me leave even though there was clearly no work getting done that day. I don't remember what happened after I got home...I mostly just remember the events of that day from where I sat in my seat at work. The memory of the terror has stayed with me - I still remember exactly how scared I was that day.