Watching the footage this morning I had a hard time to stop crying. Personally, I didn’t know anyone who died that day in any of the attack sites. Like everyone else on Twitter, Facebook and TV I thought about where I was and how I heard.
I had arrived at work sometime between 7:30 and 8am. I remember checking Yahoo and there was a single sentence as the lead news story. Something simple like “Plane hits World Trade Center.” The site was getting too much traffic and wouldn’t completely load. I imagined a small four-seater plane accidentally hitting a corner of one of the buildings. At that point, there was no way to imagine or comprehend what really happened.
We piped in a news radio station to our speaker phones so we could listen to the news. Even when the first tower collapsed there was still feeling of denial. There’s no way a building over 100 stories could have collapsed. I just couldn’t believe what I was hearing. I had been to the viewing deck on a really special trip to New York. There’s just no way.
It’s odd, in my previous two jobs with the Cardinals and Charter, I was used to everyone having a TV in their office. My boss ran home to get a small portable TV so we could see the news coverage. I didn’t see any footage of the towers falling until probably 10 or 10:30 St. Louis time. I still didn’t believe what I was seeing.
Experiencing this devastating event with co-workers was interesting. My title at that time was project manager and I shared an office with another pm. I remember us talking about how crazy it was that Bin Laden could ‘project manage’ this incredibly complex and senseless attack on four different sites from a cave in Afghanistan. The coordination of all the people, their specific assignments, their training, booking all the flights, getting the exact seat, getting through security etc. Imagine if he had put all those resources together for some good.
I have to say, after watching a lot of the footage and memorial shows today, State Farm nailed it with their commercial with the kids singing the Alicia Keyes song “Streets of New York” to a group of fire-fighters.
No comments:
Post a Comment