I Still Remember September 11
A few days prior to the 11th the company I had worked for was "upgrading" their operating system and it was the agent's office job to save all documents on external storage and then add it back onto the system after the upgrade was completed. So for several days prior, that's what most of my time was comprised. Our scheduled upgrade date September 11th. So I had to transfer over 1,000 documents before that date plus do all my other work too. I was pretty stressed.
Unable to work on our computers on the 11th, it was an automatic day off until the upgrade was complete. Then after I would have all the stress of adding all the documents back onto the operating system plus all my other work as well. So my one day off in between this chaos was supposed by restful and relaxing.
I had slept in till about 11am, till my boss had called me to ask me about a certain acct, since he couldn't access it via the computer. While we were chatting about it I had walked past a TV that my roommate was watching and I saw that some building in NY city was on fire. While my boss was looking through the paper file to find a particular piece of data, there was a silence on the phone, I was mesmerized about the coverage of this building and then they showed the replay of the plane slamming into the building. I said, to my boss, have you heard about what's going on in NYC and he said yeah, it's been on the news all morning. It was so fascinating I had to walk away from the TV in order to concentrate on what he wanted to discuss.
After I hung up with him I went back to the TV. I asked my roommate when did this happen, she told me it started just before 9am. So instead of resting, I was glued to the TV watching the coverage. Then later on I decided to tape some of the coverage so I could review it in the future since I was witnessing history. I found an open space, loaded up my VCR and began taping. I taped not only major news stations, but all different channels view of the event.
It was amazing some channels stopped programming and just put a notice on their screen to tune into a particular news channel. I had never seen this before. Another amazing thing, I viewed very few commercials. None on the news channels and limited on the others. Every single channel covered this event. Even MTV, VH1, Discovery etc... These channels at that time didn't provide any kind of news programming. I even watched some of the Spanish channel's coverage. They were the only broadcasters that showed the people jumping from the buildings. It was riveting. I was glued to the set for more than 3-4 hours when I realized I must do something else today.
I still have that tape, though my VCR doesn't work anymore. I hope to someday buy a VCR/DVD combo and transfer that coverage, I'd love to watch it again.
