Four years ago today, I stood before the black sky completely in bewilderment. At 10PM, I finally stepped out of my apartment walked outside of the building complex apprehensively. I couldn’t believe my own eyes - the towering buildings were gone, as though they were a figment of my imagination.
That very morning, I was rudely awakened by a phone call – “A plane crashed into the Towers and I can see the tail sticking out!”
“That’s a not funny.” I said angrily.
He replied, “No, it’s not, go and check the news to see what’s going on.”
I turned on the TV set and every television network was scrambling around to find out what on earth had just happened. There were speculations about a small aircraft crashing into Tower – a repeat of JFK Jr’s incident in NYC.
Then I received a slew of phone calls regarding my safety since I worked in the World Financial Center, the buildings were located right across the street from the Towers. I started calling around trying to ascertain the situation but no one was answering the call. Uh-oh.
The second plane hit. I couldn’t believe what I was seeing on television – another airliner had plowed right into the 2nd Tower and only one word flashed across my mind: Terrorism.
The 2nd crash impacted my TV reception and I could only receive one channel – WCBS-TV. With so much ruckus going on at home, my baby had awakened from her sleep and wanted to watch Sesame Street. Since visibility on TV was close to nil, I gave into her demands while dialing up everyone I knew who worked in the immediate area.
For the next few hours, I had no knowledge of what was going on. All I could see were hordes of people passing by my window in frustration, fear and anxiety. I panicked over thoughts of another fearsome attack, evacuation, and even looting (ID4 came to mind). I looked at my toddler, who was barely 2 at the time, completely engrossed with Elmo’s World. Without a single care in the world, an innocent had no knowledge of the dangers our world is susceptible to. Twice within the hour, my windows and blinds shook. Dumbfounded, I had no knowledge that the mighty Towers felled, creating a mini-quake a few miles away. I live 35 minutes walking distance from the area (going east to west on the map), and it isn’t exactly what you call a jump, a hop, or a skip away.
It was fated for me to stay home 4 years ago. My mother suffered partial blindness due to macular degeneration in May, causing her to wreak psychological warfare against myself and the world. She went shopping around the town looking for a retina specialist who would unnecessarily operate on her condition; whereas, the previous big shot specialist insisted on allowing Mother Nature manage the healing process. As a result, mum suffered from retinal detachment and the hemorrhaging caused further damage to her right eye. Only if she had listened to me...but no, of course not.
In anger, my mother lashed out on Mikayla. Yup, she did. She blamed my baby since she was a child born on Chinese New Year which brought on ill-luck towards her (as an elder). Supposedly the scales were tipped tremendously in terms of yin energy and it was more than what my mother could handle.
From that day forth, my mother booted Miki out of her house and told me to go figure something out. She wasn’t going to baby-sit any longer. In desperation, I enlisted the help of one of Lucifer’s pawns, the evil mother-in-law. Not only was my child neglected, spoiled, and cared based on convenience, my relationship at home deteriorated tremendously as she deemed me to be an unfit human being. Moreover, I fighting fires everywhere - dealing with heinous corporate drama, raising a toddler, getting out of family debt, an ulcer, and other fecal matters.
I’ve had enough.
So, I took matters in my own hands and decided to find a daycare center for Mikayla. I decided to take 9/10 & 9/11 off just to shop around the neighborhood. Keep in mind the internet was still lacking in terms of trying to search for budget-conscious daycare, so flipping the yellow pages actually made more sense.
The thing is…if mum had never been stricken with blindness, who knows what my fate would have been on that day. Honestly, I envisioned myself taking the M15 (instead of the M9 due to its infrequency) bus, getting off at City Hall, walking towards Church Street to the World Trade Center train station (A, C, E lines), cutting through the WTC to reach Liberty Street, and boarding an escalator to Tower I of the WFC. Since I was consistently tardy, at approximately 8:46AM, I can see me walking out of the WTC exit (via Tower 2) with a chunk of the building falling right on top of my head.
Because this is exactly what happened to an unfortunate few.
What I’m describing here is my daily routine. I took those 2 days off to care and baby-sit for my baby due to my cataclysmic home life. To this day, I remain forever grateful for being able to completely avoid the situation.
Later in the day, I headed over to mum’s since her phone line and TV was still fully functional. I saw horrible images of death - unedited, undisclosed, and raw. These came strictly from international news channels that aired earlier footage about the tragedy. In the States, the networks soon began to edit their content as horrified viewers called in, demanding the preservation of dignity and respect after seeing men clad in their business suits plunging to their deaths. The repetitive showing of these video clips was degrading and as of this point, ratings truly should not have mattered.
Thanks to mum’s functional phone, I received a phone call from my VP requesting my attendance at the contingency site out in the Joisey boondocks the very next day. Because of my previous experience with Treasury Funding, I was shifted from a double AA category to a triple AAA based on job function alone. Our offices were severely damaged and there was no access to the buildings. I was advised that I would remain in NJ indefinitely…until the Firm was rebuilt.
Holy shit.
So Jessica and I both struggled to make travel arrangements to get out of the city. With all of the major highways and roads shut down, we were unsure how to get to Carlstadt (better known as swamp city). It was extremely difficult to make a simple outbound phone call on a landline or cell phone since all lines to NYC were tied up as well as having limited access to the internet.
A fight ensued in my own home since no one could watch the baby. My attendance was mandatory so was Rich's - being on-call (24 hours) at the hospital in preparation for a surge of wounded victims coming in. As we now know it, this never took place. Both of us contended for the right to contribute during this chaos.
I remember waking up to a chilly and brisk morning. Quality of sleep was poor since I was startled by every vehicle speeding past by my window as well as the F-16 swooping overhead. Candles were being lit in my courtyard, in memory of the lost souls. Seeing how some of the candles blown out by the wind, I frantically tried to relight them all before departing the area.
After much hairy ado, Jess and I finally reached Hoboken. We waited on some local street for the car service to come and drive us over to the contingency site. Because Hoboken has morphed into a young and expensive part of Joisey, there a row of nice benches for us to sit. It was undetermined when the car would arrive, so I decided to drink my ever necessary cup of Joe. As I peeled back the lid of my cup,a humongous and juicy fly flew straight by and plopped into my coffee cup. Egads! Thankfully, I was able to buy another cup or else my brain would have been in dire straits without my cawfee.
We got to the site at 10:30AM along with a busload of US Trust employees (their offices were located in WTC and lost half of their staff). To my dismay, our room was incredibly small with 30 other Fidelity employees running around amok. Although it was equipped with everyday tools like computers, printers, copiers, telephones, and chairs, the place lacked necessary items such as: office supplies, systems, network access, email, and adding machines.
Tension was astronomically high. With everyone fighting to fix accounts, reconstitute prior day activity (or the lack of) and such, my group was furiously trying to take loans out from everyone on the Street. While Jessica tried to determine the current cash flow of the Firm, I helped reconstructing her spreadsheet from scratch. Without our trusty contact sheet, we were faced with an arduous task of searching phone numbers using creative means. I remember calling up another Fidelity Cash Management colleague in Boston asking ANY bank information on all of her contacts. Through them, I would try and get a hold of OUR contacts. Thankfully, I was blessed with people who sympathized with us and wanted to help.
Although I hadn’t taken a loan out in 3 years, most of the bank officers remembered me and I pulled in about $150MM. Because of our manual circumstances, I revamped all of the processes to adapt in our new and laborious working environment. As I peered over my shoulder at Jessica, I noticed her frenetic state. I tried to make myself an ass so it would alleviate some of the tension in our area. It failed.
The shocking revelation came to me – how much technology has impacted on our lives and how we’ve asserted ourselves to this dependency. At some point, Jess was at a loss for words, for action, and even for cause. Because I had seen the operational changes stemming from 1993 to 2001, most of the automated enhancements were implemented on my part. When I first came on board, I was trained to do all of my jobs manually with the extensive use of adding machines, running tapes, and massive dot matrix printouts.
On the other hand, Jess entered the brokerage world of emails, heavy-duty Macro operated MS Excel spreadsheets, databases, fancy GUI front-ends, data entry batch uploads, and file downloads. What formerly took me 2 hours to process, now only takes Jessica a mere 20 minutes (thanks to me, of course). Manual processes were something which existed in the Jurassica period, backup procedures were not the first thing on her mind.
This is where I step in.Being a brilliant girl, Jess adapted quickly; whereas, a slew of her colleagues struggled to keep afloat with the manual processes. Between myself and a few other ‘veterans’, we hacked away at every task with diligence and persistence. With the fate of the Firm in our hands, all of the resident experts were called back to their previous job functions to quickly troubleshoot and identify the issues at hand. No time was to be wasted. Never in this lifetime did I think the ability to reconcile manually would be a significant and a necessary skill.
We worked feverishly till 11PM for the next 3 nights. Everyone was up early and reported to the site at 7AM. During this time, the Federal Reserve remained opened until midnight each day to allow emergency funding through. Wall Street was in shambles as banking and brokerage companies were forced to relocate and rebuild their processes. Many major firms needed to settle later than the usual cutoff because it was now deemed an impossible task. On the flip side, other brokerage firms held up our settlements; thus, causing our Treasury staff and other dependent units to huddle over computers later than everyone else.
At the end of the day, we would peek at the news in high hopes that there would a slew of survivors or some happy ending story. The photographs of the area were extremely traumatizing, most of us couldn’t even recognize some of the streets we walked every day of our lives.
The following week, all of the employees were requested to attend, regardless of their contingent category. This became chaotic as there were serious limitations in workspace. You know how they have those signs that say “Occupancy by More Than XXX People is Unlawful and Hazardous”? Well, we definitely went beyond the body count, fer sure. Imagine cramming over 120 people into a room that was only intended for 45 people. As a result, some other folks were stuck in the warehouse wing of the area since it was clear no more bodies could fit. No kidding, but I was so overwhelmed at one point that I was working at some secluded spot in the building and did my work on the floor. This reminded me of my high school days where it was really cool to sit and do work in the hallways.
As each day passed by, I began to feel a sense of loss. We were stuck in a sweatshop with extreme bouts of emotions emitting from everyone’s pores. Disastrous and gut-wrenching stories were reiterated, survivor’s guilt, and the sense of loss hung over us like a dark, stormy cloud. This is where my smoking habit kicked in full-time. I became a nervous wreck, the thought of being so far away from home caused me a great deal of pain. At this point, my anger was starting to get out of control, I had a little baby at home, my mother was blind, etc.
Because I had temporarily switched job functions to support the reconstruction effort, Colleen decided to wield her evil sword at me for not fulfilling my Systems/Operations duties (which, of course, she should have substituted and accomplished on my behalf like everyone else in the firm did). She launched the most evil and malevolent tirade against me - the despicable cow sent me a tawdry email about my so-called negligence while seated directly behind me. Instead of saying it to my face, the cylindrical asswipe had to put it on an email.
THIS WAS THE LAST DRAW.Seeing blood, I stood and turned around with my adrenaline pumping. I brashly picked up my task chair and was just about to swing it over her head when my buddy, Terry, walked over. Realizing the potential damage, I immediately dropped the chair and smiled at him. I don’t believe Terry had a clue what I had planned to do, but he came by to tell me some unfortunate news about the twins.
Let me tell you this, the chair was pretty darn heavy.
With the exception in my case, most people have learned to deal with each other respectfully and let bygones be bygones. Certain relationships reconciled, while others learned to fuse tolerance and make peace. For the most part, everyone joined together to display the most impressive show of camaraderie while Colleen had to f**k all of it up with her morbid sense of self-conceit.
So when she asked me to join a daily status meeting with sr. management regarding some mainframe bullshit, I came in with such an attitude that the jaws of my Systems cohorts hit the floor. I was grossly abrasive and rude; even in front of my own VP, especially since I wanted no part in the systems discussion. It had nothing to do with my current role(s) and the psychocunt wanted me to do HER fricking job. Due to our personal differences, I moved over to Treasury Operations as a deal to keep me from leaving Fidelity.
The next week, I wrapped up business BS and went on leave. I couldn’t deal with the commute, tension, the rotund freak, and just about every issue I’ve had to contend with at the time. Every night for six months, the burning stench seeped into my home along with the dust and soot. For a few months, I was befuddled as to how or why my apartment was always dusty, even after frequent cleanings. I really thought I was losing it.
For a month, I would light up candles and relight the other ones by the courtyard bench. The makeshift memorial was my only outlet. Thankfully, no one I personally knew was killed in the disaster. Two years later, I didn’t have any candles left during the NYC blackout.
I can tell you right now that my DVD and CD players are completely dead thanks to the dust accumulated in them. After 4 years, things aren’t really quite the same. Park Row remains blockaded, disallowing any type of traffic; NYPD, FDNY, & I Love NY T-shirts are still popular; Madison & Henry Streets are now extremely sunny and bright since the Towers once shielded the light away – casting a shadow for miles and protecting us from the harsh rays.
Although today is sad, sad day…I have since moved on. I look back only to remember the agony I’ve once endured and how I’ve grown from it. My truest memory is the spirit of everyone setting aside their differences and unselfishly giving 150% to reestablish normalcy. The message we gave was clear: joining forces to let the outside world know we will not surrender in defeat nor will we remain down for long. By all means, we will persevere.
These are just my high level thoughts about the event. I could go on forever about what I saw, heard, and experienced, but why relive a horror when I can look forward. If anyone wants to delve on, you know where to find me.
