If you’d told me 16 years ago that I’d actually be working down here, in NYC, I would have thought you were nuts.
Growing up, everyone remembered where they were when JFK was assassinated.
I’ll always remember where I was on this day, 16 years ago. Sitting at my desk at the library system I was working for. While in a chatroom, bullshitting with my friends one tells us ‘a plane just hit one of the twin towers.’
“How the hell do you hit a big ass building?”
Second plane hit… we all realized at the same time nothing was going to be the same again. We lost a lot of innocent people, we lost a lot of our innocence, our naivety.
Still sitting at my desk, trying to take in what was going on as every single news site on the Internet was crawling due to the load… my entire Rockland County network went red. When one of the towers collapsed, beams launched through the roads and into the basement at a Verizon collocation, flooding it and shutting it down.
The rest of the day I was on the road, visiting every library that had a modem and restoring connectivity back to the main library network over dialup as all our circuits were gone indefinitely. Was eerie driving on 17E doing 20 over the limit… passing rows of State Troopers sitting on the median all listening to their radios in the same shock as everyone else.
Everyone I spoke to that day had the same stunned…disconnected look on their face.
I don’t think it really hit me until a few days later, after my job for the time being was done… I’m almost glad I was so busy on 9/11/2001. I’ll never forget that morning though.
Clear blue sky, crisp air, was a beautiful day.