OFF; TURN ON YOUR TV'S

[Stephen Swann]

On Tue, Sep 11, 2001 at 10:19:46AM -0400, Brian Halligan wrote:
> > TURN ON YOUR TV'S OR RADIOS OR WHATEVER, SHOCKING NEWS,
> > UNBELIEVABLE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
>
> Please, all NYC listmembers write in and let us know that you're OK.

You know, this is way the hell off topic, but I'm going to
break protocol for once.  My company had 11,000 people in
the World Financial Center (those blocky looking buildings
with the little glass pyramids on top that you see in the
helicopter shots of the World Trade Center wreckage).  My
company seems to have "only" (a sick thought, I know) lost 2
employees, and amazingly enough, I lost no-one that I know.
A miracle, really: I have friends and co-workers who spent a
lot of time in the twin towers, including one with two young
daughters, who was late for a meeting there that morning.  A
junior SA I hired a couple months back was coming up out of
the subway tunnels at Portland Street when the first plane
hit, and was only a couple blocks away when the buildings
collapsed.  Another older co-worker of mine, a gentleman
close to retirement age, who usually professes to have seen
it all, was close to tears in attempting to describe the
scene.

I tell you, this kind of stuff changes your life.  At times,
the magnitude of the event seems so enormous that it becomes
impersonalized, until I recall how many of my close personal
friends came to dying that morning.  I'm not going to
discuss politics here.  I just wanted to tell you what it's
like to work across from what used to be one of the greatest
man-made views in the world.  I can't adequately describe
the feelings that I have looking at the hole in the sky
across the river.  Sometime later this week, I'm going to
have to go over to the north tower.  I'll be right next to
the Amex building where I used to work a couple of years
ago, which was being used last week as a morgue.  I'll take
the ferry, which was used to carry bodies to the Jersey
side.  The whole thing has a feeling of unreality to it - I
keep expecting that one day I'll wake up and there won't be
a smoking hole in the ground where the towers used to be.

Steve