9.11

discuss does not mean shit it up.

One of the strange things I remember from that day was looking at our servers and seeing zero calls. At the time I worked for an IVR company that hosted the toll free numbers for Dominos, Papa Johns and a bunch of other phone based surveys. Normally there would be 100’s if not 1000’s of simultanious calls but that day there were almost none. We’d call now and then just to make sure they were still up, but we knew it was just that people had better things to do. We got a few calls from clients asking if we were ok. Geographically challenged clients who saw NY in our address and I guess assumed that all of NY was NYC.

This was after a co-worker called me into his office after the first plane hit to “check out the fire at the twin towers”, and we watched the 2nd plane hit live on CNN. That’s a feeling still hard to describe that I know I’ll never forget. We stuck around the office until about noon when the owners decided it would better if everyone just went home to be with family.

My uncle was actually one of the iron workers who worked on tower 2 during it’s construction. I’ve got an article I saved from when the local paper back home interviewed him a couple weeks after the attack.

A good friend of mine from high school was scheduled to be in a meeting in Tower 1, one of the upper floors, on 9/11 at 8:30am but the night before the location was changed somewhere else in Manhatten. How’d you like to live with that little stroke of luck the rest of your life?

Yeah, that numb/sinking feeling I got when I saw the second plane hit is something I’ll never forget. When the first plane hit it was a freak accident tragedy, interesting to watch. The moment the second plane hit everything changed. That morning changed from a weird accident to the beginning of post 9/11 America. I didn’t know it then, but the whole damn world changed. That second plane hitting marked the beginning of the era of faceless wars. The era of an enemy we can’t see, we can’t negotiate with, we can’t plan for. No more red phones tied to Moscow, this is different.

Still ignorant to what was really occuring, I looked away from the TV for a moment, then looked back to see a cloud of dust. “Where the fuck did the tower go?”

I was in my science. class at Gow at the time, and the class was in this room in Orton hall. the place where most classes are. The room I was in is and was called “the bunker”. it was very true because the room is in the middle of the building there are no windows there where doors but if a bomb went off that is where you wanted to be. It was block schedule that day, meaning that we did not have all the classes that we would normally have there where only 4 instead of 8 each class was an hour and forty minuets long. Now back to my story I was just leaving my science class and I caught a snipe bit of the conversation. And I ease dropped for about a second and they where like “did you hear what happened to the WTC?” now this comment was not directed to me so I just went up the stairs to study hall, avoiding all the spit on the stairs so I avoided it and when I got up there I saw that one of the history teachers had a TV going I could not see through the blinds so I sat down at my study hall seat and waited. The teacher came up about two minutes later and I asked if I could go on the internet, she said yes but she told me that I had to find out what was going on. That was when I heard those bustards had flown planes in to the pentagon and also the other tower and the field in the middle of nowhere. So that is my story of 9/11 and I am sticking to it