Writer's Block: 9/11

[the_other_sandy]

9/11
Where were you?

I was actually one of the last people around here to find out what was happening. I had already been at work for 10 minutes when the first plane hit.

When I first started working at the library, everyone in my department started work at times ranging from 7:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., with the rest of the day staff starting at 8:30 a.m. or 9:00 a.m. Our new director decided to standardize start times and make everyone come in at 9:00 a.m. Existing employees were encouraged to change their start times and new employees were required to start at the new time. All that is by way of saying that on September 11, 2001, I was the only employee in the staff area at 7:30 a.m. (8:30 a.m. New York time). There was one maintenance guy cleaning downstairs, but he never came upstairs unless he had to leave the building before anyone else had come in (he didn't like leaving me alone in the building, so he would always warn me he was leaving and then he would re-lock the staff area doors for my safety).

My first hint that something was wrong was when I looked at the clock and realized it was 8:45 a.m. and I was still alone. Usually people were starting to trickle in by then and I'd be able to hear 'starting the day' noises: people greeting each other, computers booting up, drawers opening and closing, the coffee pot clanking back onto the warming plate, etc. When it got to 8:55 a.m. and I was still alone in the staff area, I started to worry. If we have an unexpected closing, it's not unheard of for the phone tree to miss me since the phone tree kicks into gear after 7:00 a.m. and I leave for work at 6:50 a.m. I was sure the morning maintenance guy wouldn't have left without telling me, so I couldn't figure out what was going on. It kept getting later and later, and finally at 8:59 a.m. everyone showed up at once, but no one was talking.

My boss came over to let me know what had happened, but what she said was that a plane had hit the World Trade Center and knocked it over. That made no sense to me, and since my boss was notorious for her poor listening comprehension in English (she was a native Chinese speaker and would frequently guess what you were saying to her based on a handful of words you'd said--she always guessed wildly wrong), I asked her what happened to the other tower. One couldn't fall over without hitting the other, right? She just looked at me blankly. She had no idea the WTC had two towers.

At that point I figured I wasn't going to get reliable information from her, so I tried to hit up CNN.com. Of course, everyone in the world was trying to hit up CNN.com too, so the site wouldn't load. Finally, a co-worker was able to get through to the Chicago Tribune website and I found out what was really going on. By then, four planes were down and the first tower had collapsed. Our director made an announcement that a TV had been set up in the staff conference room if anyone wanted to go and watch the news. I went in for a little while, but it was obvious the talking heads didn't know much yet and were just repeating themselves a lot, so I went back to my desk. In the 20 seconds or so it took me to make that walk, the second tower collapsed.

There's an email discussion list for catalogers called Autocat that in those days had very strict posting rules. No off topic posts were allowed and there was a 60 message posting cap per day to ensure that. That day, the mod lifted both restrictions and there were hundreds of posts. We found out from our colleagues at the Library of Congress that they were being evacuated, and we heard that one of our colleagues, a librarian in the Pentagon, had been badly burned when a ball of flame shot through a staff area while she was using the photocopier.

Two of my co-workers at my library were especially upset. They were married to airline pilots and both of their husbands were in the air that morning. Both pilots were fine but were stuck at their destination airports for four days.

On my way home, I channel surfed the radio to find more news. Most of the stations had DJs calling for revenge and retaliation, sometimes against terrorists but sometimes against Muslims. However my favorite radio station in the world, WXRT, proved what an amazing class act its people are. WXRT is the closest thing to a mom-and-pop radio station you'll find in this age of corporate media. Many of the DJs have been with the station for over 20 years. All the DJs came in that day. They gave air time to political science professors and religious figures to explain that the terrorists didn't represent Islam and that the average Muslim was just as horrified by the attacks as everyone else. And most amazingly, they kept repeating the station phone number and telling people that if they didn't have anyone to talk to to call the station because no one should have to go through this alone. Several days later, WXRT had the coolest ever fund-raiser for the Red Cross. If you donated a certain amount of money and faxed or emailed the receipt to the station as proof, they would play any song you wanted. It didn't matter if it fell outside the station's genre. It didn't even matter if the station owned it. The employees were all raiding their personal record collections and the record stores in town to find the requested songs. They devoted an entire day to playing the requests of the donors, and it was a massively eclectic mix of genres and artists.

The grounding of air traffic was the only thing I experienced first-hand. I live on the flight path to O'Hare International Airport. Sometimes the planes come in a little north or south of me, but sometimes they come in directly over my patio doors. At busy times, like around Christmas, they come in every two minutes. I thought I would be relieved at the peace and quiet, but instead I spent four days waiting for the other shoe to drop because I was so used to hearing planes.

In the last 10 years, there have been scores of documentaries explaining what happened in great detail from every conceivable angle. What no one has ever been able to explain to me is how anyone could be sitting around with a childhood friend and think, 'You know what would be a great idea? Crashing planes into buildings!' I will never, ever understand how that thought could occur to anyone, let alone how they could act on it.

Comments

[seesmooshrun.livejournal.com]

I'm not a big radio listener -- but what a class act WXRT showed themselves to be. Kudos to them.

I remember the eerie emptiness and silence of the skies for the days after the attack. No jets, no noises, no contrails... nothing. Until I'd see a fighter plane, and then wonder if I should panic.

What I'd forgotten was how the grounded flight schedule affected people. A good friend who had traveled to the West Coast on business had so little hope of getting a flight anywhere near Chicago within the week, let alone O'Hare, that she rented a car and drove to Colorado or Nebraska, I forget which, while her husband drove from Chicago to meet her and bring her back so they wouldn't have to pay for the umpty-ass miles all the way to Chicago.

Thanks for sharing.

[the-other-sandy.livejournal.com]

My BF's cousin and his wife were on vacation in Australia and were stranded there for several days before they were able to fly back.

WXRT was amazing. The first song they played when they resumed their regular schedule was "I Won't Back Down" by Tom Petty. I still can't hear that song without thinking of 9/11.