Daniel
I mentioned previously that September 11, THAT September 11, impacted on us in an uncommon way. And that uncommon way must be laid out too, but in a separate posting.
I'll tell you how it happened for me. Like pretty much every sentient being there and awake when it happened it is a day etched, indelible. In the same way that my mother can relive that day in November 1963, when she and my father were living in Canada and so lived through the afternoon and the days that followed in real time.
And in the way I cannot do for the collapse of the Soviet-sponsored Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall breached - I woke up and watched the re-run; the Hungarian border guards rolling back the barbed wire fences and ushering the fleeing Ossies into Austria, I woke up and watched the re-run - and so on and so on.
The scene setting is that the Fat Bastard was away, allegedly undergoing training somewhere in the middle of nowhere and effectively incommunicado; subsequently I've come to the conclusion that he just might have been telling the truth about this.
By this time I was a fairly senior Consultant, lined up on the final approach to promotion to Manager and career blue sky. But with him away my hours in the office were heavily curtailed. Promotion to Manager would allow me to undertake the work needed on the house and engage an au pair and I was almost there, but in the mean time I ducked, wove and in terms of time did a bit of borrowing from one part of my life to prop up another.
Fortunately the type of work I was involved in enabled me to take it home and do it in the evening after my baby was tucked up. That was how I kept the boat afloat.
But sometimes the stress caught up with me and I'd develop a kind of strep throat. But I'd gone into the office on that Tuesday because I'd not taken my lap top with me the previous evening and could not take anything workwise much further without it.
The morning passed in a bit of a blur and by lunch time the only reason I was still there was that I felt too awful to face the trek home. In our open plan office my station was at the corridor end of a rank of three at right angles to a window in the outside wall. The senior managers had the stations at the window end; the more senior members of staff being Partners and Directors had their stations enclosed as offices. Each rank of three had a facing rank of three, creating a cluster of six. The other way of looking at this arrangement is that each rank of three had a similar rank of three backing onto it, creating a pool of six usually with a line of low cabinets creating a divide.
From my station I trotted back and forth to the water fountain regularly. Luckily most of the more senior staff seemed to be absent that day, for one reason or another; either attending internal jollies or on client visits.
On one such trip one of my colleagues, sitting in the corridor end station that backed onto mine happened to remark that a plane had flown into the World Trade Centre. My excuse for my initial reaction is that I was unwell, and besides there's more than one World Trade Centre. Except of course that there is (or was) really only One World Trade Centre.
I glanced at his computer screen and saw the tiny CNN window, within it the smaller image of one of the towers with what appeared to be a black hole in it.
The very first news reports emerged at 13:48 London-time, of American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles impacting the North Tower a couple of minutes earlier. At 14:03 United Airlines flight 175, also flying from Boston to Los Angeles struck the South Tower of the World Trade Centre.
Not a coincidence, deliberately wrought carnage in the centre of New York City. My colleague kept open his CNN coverage, a female colleague occupying the Senior Manger's station at the end of my rank kept open a dialogue with a friend inside the BBC while I established a streaming link with Radio Australia (which was actually broadcasting BBC material rather than a domestic perception). In fact the internal network collapsed that afternoon under the sustained assault we made endeavouring to access the outside world electronically.
Everything ground to halt while we absorbed the hijacking and crashing of four planes within the north-east of the United States, we listened to the reports of the collapse of the twin towers, gruesome speculation about the toll and the motives or those behind the attacks, the early moves by the US administration to get control and the early concerns that the events in the US were part of a bigger plan or would be replicated elsewhere.
The South Tower collapse commenced very shortly before 15:00 (London) and the North Tower came down almost precisely half an hour later.
I left the office at around 1630 and made my way on foot to Liverpool Street amid stories of the evacuation of Canary Wharf - to which a lot of financial institutions had moved in recent years and which is particularly distinct in the London skyline. I had always preferred the twenty minute walk to the hassle of a tube trip round from Farringdon. I enjoyed the exercise and the chance to see London from the pavement up.
My usual route on foot took me up the stairs to the Viaduct and then past St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the church where one of my sets of Gx5 Grandparents was married aeons ago, and the Old Bailey. Before the end of Newgate Street I normally turn left, past the old Post Office building onto London Wall, past the museum, and up to Moorgate and then South Place and Eldon Street/Broadgate and the station entrance there.
But that night I chose instead to take the route I rarely used; rather than go left up King Edward I carried on along Newgate, past the tube station and St Paul's Cathedral and then on up Cheapside and Poultry to Threadneedle, which took me past the Old Lady and the Stock Exchange then onto old Broad Street, then across London Wall and ultimately to the same Broadgate entrance.
The roads on this route are narrower, there is a sense of closeness or tightness about the environment, the pavements too are narrow and a great deal of scaffolding clutters them. Also it isn't so flat, the roads undulate gently and with the older architecture (except for the wall itself of course, lower remnants of which really are Roman) it is an altogether more interesting walk if longer and more tiring. Ordinarily the route is like the bull run, but with the herd stampeding in two directions (one lot for the overground, the other lot for St Paul's and Bank tube stations).
Memory plays tricks; it seemed that night to be twilight and cold. It feels rather as I imagine it would after the bomb went off (somewhere else, obviously).
While one of the two key centres for global capitalism might just have been brought to its knees this one still stood, physically at least. Suited workers of all ages drifted out onto the streets as I passed their buildings; to wander around aimlessly, quiet. Many huddled in doorways or the entrance to alleyways and smoked frantically. At this stage no one yet had any clear idea of the scale of the loss of life or the meaning behind the attacks; in fact we didn't know if it really was over.
The scene at the station was like something out of bedlam, with hoards attempting to force their way onto the limited number of pre-peak hour services while railway staff struggled to keep things safe. I wanted a newspaper, something concrete to cling to although it was far too soon for any comprehensive or balanced coverage. I eventually managed to buy one from a vendor up on Bishopsgate and made my way back down to the concourse and onto a train that got me part of the way home. It was crammed full of people getting out early in a panic given the speculation about similar attacks on London, or because their employer had sent them home early.
The train was silent, all the way out to the junction where I left it. What on earth could we say to one another.
I spent the evening and the following day at home immersed in the intense media coverage which followed. To a remarkable degree compared with many similarly or seemingly 'earth-shattering' stories the prolonged coverage was justified by the way in which the story continued to emerge and evolve over an extended period. The death toll came down, mercifully, and it became apparant that virtually no one had been trapped in the wreckage and survived.
One of the most deeply affected companies was Cantor Fitzgerald, what we were calling a Financial Intermediary with few direct comparators. Its staff, largely trapped above the point of impact had been decimated. It didn't escape me that not so much earlier, before the project went horribly wrong, the idea had been floated that I might fly out to the US to interview an appropriate senior exec for information for a research project I was doing on Financial Intermediaries in the US, London and on the Continent.
The following day and with the entire world still grappling with the enormity of the attack, the so-called Assault on America, I went back into the office, switched on my computer and went into my emails. Almost the first thing I saw was an email from the local leader of one of my projects: an US technology company with a particularly high profile in printing.
The Global lead partner for this particularly important client of the firm, a guy I'd been in conference calls with as recently as the previous fortnight, a guy I had saved emails from had been on one of the flights (UA175, which crashed in to the South Tower, the second to be struck).
Some one I knew, albeit not so well, had been killed. What happened was no longer abstract or remotely horrific. And it got worse later in the day when the official notification from the office of the Global Managing Partner hit my in-box. Four of our people were among those on the hijacked planes; two of them were partners and two of them were very young and new to the Firm.
Three of them were travelling on business but Dan, and this was absolutely the worst of it, was returning home after a holiday with his partner and their three year old son - the same age as my daughter. Quite what went on inside that plane for Dan, Ronald and their boy from the moment the hijackers made their move to the moment of impact is something I cannot bring myself to dwell on but I cannot forget either. I remained with the firm for another 16 months, but the light went out that day a bit.
The FI project turned into a disaster, for reasons wholly unrelated to this commentary, while the US tech firm continued to be a client with work for me coming through periodically. I made manager but there was no promised land. When I was offered a sizeable payout to leave I went without a backward glance, relieved to be free to rediscover my soul and rebuild my self respect.
My need for this freedom was as you may already have deduced not even largely a result of my time with the firm, and some of its people paid a far higher price for working there than I ever did.
The last thing I did before my departure, my 'switching off of the lights", was to delete the last saved emails in my account; and they were the ones from Dan.
I'll tell you how it happened for me. Like pretty much every sentient being there and awake when it happened it is a day etched, indelible. In the same way that my mother can relive that day in November 1963, when she and my father were living in Canada and so lived through the afternoon and the days that followed in real time.
And in the way I cannot do for the collapse of the Soviet-sponsored Eastern Europe. The Berlin Wall breached - I woke up and watched the re-run; the Hungarian border guards rolling back the barbed wire fences and ushering the fleeing Ossies into Austria, I woke up and watched the re-run - and so on and so on.
The scene setting is that the Fat Bastard was away, allegedly undergoing training somewhere in the middle of nowhere and effectively incommunicado; subsequently I've come to the conclusion that he just might have been telling the truth about this.
By this time I was a fairly senior Consultant, lined up on the final approach to promotion to Manager and career blue sky. But with him away my hours in the office were heavily curtailed. Promotion to Manager would allow me to undertake the work needed on the house and engage an au pair and I was almost there, but in the mean time I ducked, wove and in terms of time did a bit of borrowing from one part of my life to prop up another.
Fortunately the type of work I was involved in enabled me to take it home and do it in the evening after my baby was tucked up. That was how I kept the boat afloat.
But sometimes the stress caught up with me and I'd develop a kind of strep throat. But I'd gone into the office on that Tuesday because I'd not taken my lap top with me the previous evening and could not take anything workwise much further without it.
The morning passed in a bit of a blur and by lunch time the only reason I was still there was that I felt too awful to face the trek home. In our open plan office my station was at the corridor end of a rank of three at right angles to a window in the outside wall. The senior managers had the stations at the window end; the more senior members of staff being Partners and Directors had their stations enclosed as offices. Each rank of three had a facing rank of three, creating a cluster of six. The other way of looking at this arrangement is that each rank of three had a similar rank of three backing onto it, creating a pool of six usually with a line of low cabinets creating a divide.
From my station I trotted back and forth to the water fountain regularly. Luckily most of the more senior staff seemed to be absent that day, for one reason or another; either attending internal jollies or on client visits.
On one such trip one of my colleagues, sitting in the corridor end station that backed onto mine happened to remark that a plane had flown into the World Trade Centre. My excuse for my initial reaction is that I was unwell, and besides there's more than one World Trade Centre. Except of course that there is (or was) really only One World Trade Centre.
I glanced at his computer screen and saw the tiny CNN window, within it the smaller image of one of the towers with what appeared to be a black hole in it.
The very first news reports emerged at 13:48 London-time, of American Airlines Flight 11 from Boston to Los Angeles impacting the North Tower a couple of minutes earlier. At 14:03 United Airlines flight 175, also flying from Boston to Los Angeles struck the South Tower of the World Trade Centre.
Not a coincidence, deliberately wrought carnage in the centre of New York City. My colleague kept open his CNN coverage, a female colleague occupying the Senior Manger's station at the end of my rank kept open a dialogue with a friend inside the BBC while I established a streaming link with Radio Australia (which was actually broadcasting BBC material rather than a domestic perception). In fact the internal network collapsed that afternoon under the sustained assault we made endeavouring to access the outside world electronically.
Everything ground to halt while we absorbed the hijacking and crashing of four planes within the north-east of the United States, we listened to the reports of the collapse of the twin towers, gruesome speculation about the toll and the motives or those behind the attacks, the early moves by the US administration to get control and the early concerns that the events in the US were part of a bigger plan or would be replicated elsewhere.
The South Tower collapse commenced very shortly before 15:00 (London) and the North Tower came down almost precisely half an hour later.
I left the office at around 1630 and made my way on foot to Liverpool Street amid stories of the evacuation of Canary Wharf - to which a lot of financial institutions had moved in recent years and which is particularly distinct in the London skyline. I had always preferred the twenty minute walk to the hassle of a tube trip round from Farringdon. I enjoyed the exercise and the chance to see London from the pavement up.
My usual route on foot took me up the stairs to the Viaduct and then past St Sepulchre-without-Newgate, the church where one of my sets of Gx5 Grandparents was married aeons ago, and the Old Bailey. Before the end of Newgate Street I normally turn left, past the old Post Office building onto London Wall, past the museum, and up to Moorgate and then South Place and Eldon Street/Broadgate and the station entrance there.
But that night I chose instead to take the route I rarely used; rather than go left up King Edward I carried on along Newgate, past the tube station and St Paul's Cathedral and then on up Cheapside and Poultry to Threadneedle, which took me past the Old Lady and the Stock Exchange then onto old Broad Street, then across London Wall and ultimately to the same Broadgate entrance.
The roads on this route are narrower, there is a sense of closeness or tightness about the environment, the pavements too are narrow and a great deal of scaffolding clutters them. Also it isn't so flat, the roads undulate gently and with the older architecture (except for the wall itself of course, lower remnants of which really are Roman) it is an altogether more interesting walk if longer and more tiring. Ordinarily the route is like the bull run, but with the herd stampeding in two directions (one lot for the overground, the other lot for St Paul's and Bank tube stations).
Memory plays tricks; it seemed that night to be twilight and cold. It feels rather as I imagine it would after the bomb went off (somewhere else, obviously).
While one of the two key centres for global capitalism might just have been brought to its knees this one still stood, physically at least. Suited workers of all ages drifted out onto the streets as I passed their buildings; to wander around aimlessly, quiet. Many huddled in doorways or the entrance to alleyways and smoked frantically. At this stage no one yet had any clear idea of the scale of the loss of life or the meaning behind the attacks; in fact we didn't know if it really was over.
The scene at the station was like something out of bedlam, with hoards attempting to force their way onto the limited number of pre-peak hour services while railway staff struggled to keep things safe. I wanted a newspaper, something concrete to cling to although it was far too soon for any comprehensive or balanced coverage. I eventually managed to buy one from a vendor up on Bishopsgate and made my way back down to the concourse and onto a train that got me part of the way home. It was crammed full of people getting out early in a panic given the speculation about similar attacks on London, or because their employer had sent them home early.
The train was silent, all the way out to the junction where I left it. What on earth could we say to one another.
I spent the evening and the following day at home immersed in the intense media coverage which followed. To a remarkable degree compared with many similarly or seemingly 'earth-shattering' stories the prolonged coverage was justified by the way in which the story continued to emerge and evolve over an extended period. The death toll came down, mercifully, and it became apparant that virtually no one had been trapped in the wreckage and survived.
One of the most deeply affected companies was Cantor Fitzgerald, what we were calling a Financial Intermediary with few direct comparators. Its staff, largely trapped above the point of impact had been decimated. It didn't escape me that not so much earlier, before the project went horribly wrong, the idea had been floated that I might fly out to the US to interview an appropriate senior exec for information for a research project I was doing on Financial Intermediaries in the US, London and on the Continent.
The following day and with the entire world still grappling with the enormity of the attack, the so-called Assault on America, I went back into the office, switched on my computer and went into my emails. Almost the first thing I saw was an email from the local leader of one of my projects: an US technology company with a particularly high profile in printing.
The Global lead partner for this particularly important client of the firm, a guy I'd been in conference calls with as recently as the previous fortnight, a guy I had saved emails from had been on one of the flights (UA175, which crashed in to the South Tower, the second to be struck).
Some one I knew, albeit not so well, had been killed. What happened was no longer abstract or remotely horrific. And it got worse later in the day when the official notification from the office of the Global Managing Partner hit my in-box. Four of our people were among those on the hijacked planes; two of them were partners and two of them were very young and new to the Firm.
Three of them were travelling on business but Dan, and this was absolutely the worst of it, was returning home after a holiday with his partner and their three year old son - the same age as my daughter. Quite what went on inside that plane for Dan, Ronald and their boy from the moment the hijackers made their move to the moment of impact is something I cannot bring myself to dwell on but I cannot forget either. I remained with the firm for another 16 months, but the light went out that day a bit.
The FI project turned into a disaster, for reasons wholly unrelated to this commentary, while the US tech firm continued to be a client with work for me coming through periodically. I made manager but there was no promised land. When I was offered a sizeable payout to leave I went without a backward glance, relieved to be free to rediscover my soul and rebuild my self respect.
My need for this freedom was as you may already have deduced not even largely a result of my time with the firm, and some of its people paid a far higher price for working there than I ever did.
The last thing I did before my departure, my 'switching off of the lights", was to delete the last saved emails in my account; and they were the ones from Dan.
posted by Enyo @ 1:39 pm
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