It Was Just About Now.

08:37am— 

I’d come into work just like any other morning.

Where I was working at the time is closed, now, and so is the department that I was working for. But I can see he layout of the place in my mind, and can even taste the coffee I was drinking that morning, from the Seattle’s Best down on the second floor. ( French Roast so strong you could stand a fork up in it.)  Oddly, I remember too about the conversation with the guy running the place about how I was glad I didn’t have to fly to get to work. You know the kind of meaningless nonsense people engage in to pass the time. Little did I know.

By about a half hour ago, I had grabbed two new HP 8150 printers …huge boxes…and was installing them on the 4th floor printer room.  My cell phone went off; my boss.

” Eric”, he says, “how you doing on those printers?”

“Just about physically installed”, I told him, “though I’ll have to tell the servers about them.”

“Fine.” he says. “That was fast… By the way, you may want to come up here, to the meeting room; someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center”.

“Oh? OK…. be up in a few”.

I went up to my office on the 7th floor, firguring some small private plane had made a course error or some such thing. I got up there in time to see the scope of the issue, and was there only a few minutes when we noted a second plane hitting the second tower.

It was of course at that point that my vauge understanding that this was no accident became a full-on conclusion that it most certainly wasn’t.

I remember calmly going back to my desk, and checking the internet connections to the outside world, and noting that my traffic indicators were screaming that internet traffic was peaking pretty wildly…  and making appropriate notes to my supervisors, since the workflows would be affected… my gates to the west coast for example were well into the red, and the POP in NYC was apparently not responding at all.  My supervisors of course being occupied with the news, would never read them.

Looking back, I suppose I was looking for some rational way to respond…. some way to apply normalcy to all of what I’d just been witness to. Of course, my response was more mechanical than rational. But you fall to the mechanical, I guess, in situations like that. All you can do is continue, while you sort things out.

By 2pm that afternoon, though,  what became this blog had been fully registered at Blogspot, and I was writing. As it turned out, BitsBlog wasn’t made public until the next day, due to an error on my part.  But I didn’t much mind. I was writing for ME, that day. An outlet for what I’d seen. What I was feeling.  It’s a cold fact that I became an activist for my own viewpoint, that day. By the way Blogdom increased that week, I’d say I wasn’t alone.

But you know… It’s the big occasions you recall with that kind of clarity. The morning JFK was killed for example, I remember being annoyed that the family TV… an old RCA black and white monster my dad had bought used somewhere, took so long to warm up. I wanted to know what was happening, right NOW, beep it, and this thing wasn’t helping.

And what happened 7 years ago, is certainly a large event, if by no other measure than the way we usually measure such things. “Where were you when…”

I note Sister Toldja has a list of links of people who remember.