I will never forget

Five years ago this morning I was sitting in my quiet office in Reading, PA. I had a sales job that required me to fly almost weekly, but that morning I was home. A coworker popped his head into my office and said in a strange tone of voice, "A plane just hit the world trade center." I asked him if it was a small plane or what? If it was an accident or on purpose. He didn't know. We speculated in the hall with a few other colleagues over our morning coffee. Then someone walked up and mentioned that a second plane had hit the other tower. I immediately knew that it couldn't be two accidents. But I still didn't realize it was huge planes, I pictured little two-seaters.

The mood was one of confusion more than shock or concern. We were all trying to log onto CNN.com and other internet news sites to find out more, but the bandwidth seemed to all be jammed and we couldn't load pages. So we decided he had better see if we could turn on the television. We dragged a TV into a back office so the rest of the building and the higher ups wouldn't notice. We huddled around a snowy TV were the only channel we could get was NBC. We listened to Katie Couric talk to someone in the Pentagon, and we all heard the explosion there live. We heard the panic in the man's voice, and the skeptic in me said "oh I'm sure it's not related...no big deal...couldn't be..." In case you didn't know this, I'm a pretty skeptical and cynical person.

Very shortly we realized that we were, in fact, under attack. People were talking about planes being grounded and planes going missing off the radar. My thoughts immediately turned to my very close friend and colleague who was flying to California that morning. Of course no one could reach him, because cell phones simply weren't working. My two least favorite colleagues (including the jerk that would later sue me and lose) were also on a plane to our office in Taiwan. We were all very worried. Fortunately all my colleagues were safe and eventually made their way home. One of my coworkers would never get on a plane again and had to quit his job because of it. We went to lunch at a local sports bar and watched with the rest of the resturant in horror as they showed clips of people jumping out of the buildings before they fell. I went home that evening and bawled my eyes out.

A week later I drove north for a sales trip to CT. I wasn't even thinking when my car sped down Rt. 78 through New Jersey, rounded the corner and gave me the most chilling view I'd ever seen...the New York skyline I had always loved seeing, minus the twin towers.

A month later I got on a plane to Atlanta for a big sales convention. I was proudly defiant, refusing to be afraid. I checked into the Westin Peachtree hotel, which is the huge glass cylinder that stands way out alone on the Atlanta skyline. The clerk asked me if I'd prefer a room on a low floor or a high floor. I chose the high floor. I checked into my room on the 60somethingth floor, which had one wall entirely of glass, and I walked over and peered out into the sky and thought to myself...this is almost the same view so many people had that day just before they died.