Joe(e) posted about a strong 9/11 memory, which prompted me to write about mine:
Like most others on the west coast, we woke up to a phone call telling us to turn on the TV. We did, just in time to see the surprised look on the newscaster's face as the second plane hit. We sat on the bed and stared at the TV for hours, eventually grabbing our laptops to contact friends and family via IM and talk about it. None of us lived anywhere near NY or DC so we were just observers with no personal connections.
One of my sisters had given birth to a baby ten days before, on 9/1/1. So she's at home, alone, with a newborn, watching the same things. For some reason that really sticks with me.
Eventually we decided that since we didn't know what to do with ourselves, we should go into work and maybe we'd find something to do. I had a conference call scheduled for that afternoon and I was planning on declining, but got on it anyway, I don't remember why. On the conference call one of the other guys kept talking about a customer problem and other things related to work and I just got so mad, at one point I just shouted "I can't believe you're worrying so much about a software problem at a time like this" and hung up.
We went home, still numb, and the next morning went back in to work, still numb. That's when I found out that one of my developers had ridden his bike home the previous night (like he did every night, rain or shine), walked into his house where his wife and two teenage children were, and keeled over dead from a heart attack.
So for me, it wasn't just 9/11, but 9/12.
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