Elegy.

 

Monday, September 10, 2001

Another day, another migraine. Please kill me.

Anyone who suffers from migraines knows what I’m talking about. Otherwise, it’s difficult to convey their awfulness, although Michael O’Donoghue came close with his SNL impression of a man stabbing himself in the eye with an icepick.

Anyhow, I awakened with a pretty bad one; not my worst, about six out of ten on the barf-o-meter, but enough to keep me home in a dark, quiet room on most days. Not today, however; I had been on vacation with my wife and my 3-year-old and 6-month-old boys in Wally World and needed to be in the office to catch up on the latest gossip and a few thousand e-mails, so I popped a few Excedrins and headed off to work.

Things were pretty quiet when I got in, thank God. Which is normal when you start at 7 AM and most of your co-workers begin to show up between 8 and 9. As people began to trickle in I noticed an atypically somber vibe as if some dark cloud had descended; the usual friendly greetings and mindless banter were missing, and I found myself wondering what I’d missed.

Ron showed up a little after 8. Ron is my manager, and also my best friend. He is sober for fourteen years, one more than I; unlike myself he saw the warning signs and quit before things got completely out of hand. By the time I got the message I was jobless, friendless and very nearly homeless; that is a whole other story. His take on the alcoholic mindset is still the best I’ve heard: “Anything worth doing is worth doing to excess.” Words to live by.

We went up to the smoking room to have our usual morning smoke, where we’d discuss family, current events, sports, and inside scoop on company goings-on. He was not his usual chipper self, my inquiries as to the state of the organization were met with a frown and a shake of the head. “Can’t say right now.” This was not good, rumors of layoffs were all over the office.

Meanwhile, that migraine… Coffee and analgesics are not doing the trick, maybe lunch will help. Bad idea, now I feel like heaving. Back to my desk – hmm, workstation is down, I wonder why? Reboot… uh-oh, that is a nasty grinding noise. Adios, hard drive. Time to contact desktop support. Guess I’ll go through some printed reports while I wait for a response…

Ron comes into the office at 5 PM. After informing me and my two colleagues that our department is safe, although 30 employees had just received pink slips, he asks “Why are you still here? Leave now, or I’ll call your wife”. Before leaving, I call desktop support, who inform me that they will image a new workstation which will be ready for me by 9 AM on Tuesday. Well, I won’t be of much use at 7 AM in that case, so I swap shifts with the lovely Dipti. Now, off to nurse this fucking migraine; I hope Timmy (my 6-month old) is in good spirits.

 

 

Tuesday, September 11, 2001

Well, this is more like it! No migraine, and as lovely a September morning as you are ever likely to see in New York City. Low humidity, pleasantly warm, and not a cloud in the sky. And I got an extra few hours sleep due to yesterday’s workstation issues. Here I come, world!

My daily commute begins with a stop at the 7-Eleven for coffee, a pack of unfiltered Camels, and the New York Post, which is best read backwards; sports is less rage-inducing than other local news. I fire up a smoke while waiting for the Q-14 bus which will take me to the No. 7 Flushing subway to Grand Central Station, then the 4/5 Lexington Avenue Express to Fulton Street. Finish my smoke, still no bus, might as well have another. No sooner than I put match to cigarette, the bus shows up. I ponder momentarily, and decide fuck it, I’m finishing this, I can get on the next bus and still be at work by 9. A wise choice, as it turns out.

The rest of the commute is uneventful, and I arrive at the Fulton Street station at around 8:50 AM. As I’m walking up the steps to John Street, there is a big commotion on the street and people are coming DOWN the staircase in a panic. This being NYC, I figure some idiots did something stupid (again), no big deal, and I shoulder my way to street level. Looking west, I can now see what’s going on. There is a fire in my building, looks to be a bit below my office on the 103rd floor of WTC1.

My first thought was, I guess I won’t be working today. Second thought was, that’s a pretty bad fire, I need to get a bit farther than a block away. So I hopped back on the subway and got off at Bowling Green, two stops south, to get a better view. As I’m coming up the escalator in one of those neat early twentieth century kiosks I hear a loud explosion, followed by a middle-aged black lady on the street screaming “Lord, have mercy!” I look north, and see that WTC2 is now ablaze as well; that explosion was the second plane. NYC is under attack.

Back to the subway, I need to get out of Manhattan. By now, rush hour is over and the trains are back on their normal weekday schedule. This means that the southbound No. 5 train terminates at Bowling Green and all passengers must exit that train; if you are proceeding to Brooklyn you need to board the No. 4 train. As I am standing on the platform waiting for a Brooklyn-bound 4 train, a 5 train arrives, and the conductor announces : “Last stop! All passengers must exit!” But my fellow New Yorkers, who never panic, refuse to leave the train, and are screaming at the motorman and conductor to “take this train to Brooklyn!” as if the train operators had any say in where the train was headed. During the approximately five minutes it took to convince the recalcitrant passengers to disembark, I was certain that I was about to witness something very ugly; fortunately, cooler heads prevailed.

On the way to Brooklyn, I struck up a conversation with a stranger, Anthony was his name, I think, who was trying to get home to Connecticut. In between constant interruptions from my pager informing me that first one, then another, then yet another server was down I offered to take him to my home in Whitestone, Queens, from where he could easily reach Connecticut if someone could pick him up at the foot of the Bronx-Whitestone Bridge. But first, we had to get home, and I needed to call my wife to let her know I was OK.

Getting there would be the easy part, or so I thought. There is only one major subway in NYC which does not go through Manhattan, the crosstown G train which then ran from Brooklyn to Forest Hills, Queens. We could take that to Queens, and transfer to a bus to get home.

So with Anthony in tow, I got off in downtown Brooklyn and headed for the G station. I then attempted to call home on a pay phone, but this was not possible as the system was completely overwhelmed. I did not have a cell phone at the time, but Anthony did and generously allowed me to try that. I still could not reach home, but somehow got through to family in St. Augustine, who I hoped would be able to spread the word; as it turns out, they couldn’t due to the overloaded phone system.

About that trip home… Got on the G train, which got as far as Long Island City before the subways were shut down around when the towers fell. I was pretty sure that all of my coworkers who were in the office were gone (they were; when I saw the footage of people jumping out the window I couldn’t help wondering which of my friends were among that group). About those thirty folks who were let go on Monday… Who knew that getting fired would be the best thing that ever happened? Several of them were immediately rehired when our offices were re-opened.

With nothing better to do, we started walking – to Queens Plaza, where our little parade merged with a larger group walking over the 59th street bridge, then on to Northern Boulevard in search of a bus. At about 60th St., after having walked three-to-four miles, we got a bus to Flushing from where I could board another bus to home. While we were walking, in between failed attempts to reach my wife, I remember praying not only for the families of the victims, but also for those who would perish in the inevitable war of retribution. Of course there would be a war, isn’t there always?

I finally was able to get through to my wife at 12:15PM while waiting for that bus. I said hello, she said “OH MY GOD!! OH MY GOD!!”, having long since given me up for dead. The utter anguish I heard at that moment will be with me for the rest of my life.

We got home, my kids were watching some kid shows with my Father-in-law, upstairs the news was on, an endless loop of the towers collapsing with 657 of my coworkers and over 2,000 others going down with them. The ones who didn’t jump, anyhow.

After dinner, I walked Anthony to the foot of the Whitestone bridge, where I expected he’d be able to catch a bus to the Bronx side where his wife was waiting once they re-opened the bridge. As it happened, the bridge was opened just as we got there, and a guy in a van stopped to pick up a few people and give them a ride. Anthony jumped in, about as happy an ending as could be expected.

 

 

Wednesday, September 12, 2001

I tried my best to avoid print and broadcast media. I did not need talking heads to tell me what had just taken place; I had first-hand information.

I supported a number of application teams in my role as Senior Database Administrator, and my phone number was on speed dial for a good number of developers. I received numerous phone calls from people asking if I had heard from their spouses and I remember trying to say something encouraging to each of them; I avoided asking if they had been in the office prior to 8:45 AM.

I hugged my wife and kids many times. I still hug them whenever I can. I might not be around tomorrow.

 

 

Thursday, September 13, 2001

On Thursday the 13th I drove to our new headquarters in Rochelle Park, NJ, in a former telco building which served as our Disaster Recovery site. It was tough, we had all felt a great disturbance in the Force. The Windows admins were particularly hard hit – only one remained, I’ll call him “Dick”.

And then there were none. The manager of the admin team was an ex-offensive lineman, deaf in one ear from being slapped one too many times by defensive ends; not a guy to fuck with. Dick strolled into the office and, noticing that the women (and not a few men) were having trouble keeping their shit together for some reason, loudly proclaimed “suck it up, we’ve got a company to rebuild”. He then took his manager aside for a private conversation. The way I heard it later, Dick explained to his manager that since he was now the only surviving admin he expected an increase in compensation. What we actually saw was Dick running out the door chased by a homicidal ex-football player. Dick was never to be seen again.