The initial period right after the creation of the new company was one of improvisation, because there were no physical facilities as such. Phoenix rented a couple of offices in one of those places that rents out temporary office space, and into that were crammed a few desks and some file servers and networking equipment. Most of us either worked remotely from home or at a client site.
Right before XYZ Corp. finally threw in the towel, I had been staffed on a project to redesign the Internet presence for a large regional bank. I was taking over the security design part of the project from a colleague of mine, a competent member of our information security group at XYZ, but a guy who was also a little over-intense in his devotion to the principles of what we in the business affectionately refer to as "infosec", and generally kind of an oddball; the kind of person who presents a happy, friendly facade but who simultaneously gives off a vibe of having something dark and troubling bubbling away under the surface. At some point he mentioned to me that he took regular medication for chronic depression; I don't know why he felt like sharing this with me and it wasn't something I necessarily wanted to know anyway, but it did explain some things.
But as the uncertainty created by XYZ's slow death spiral mounted, it turned out that my colleague was having marital problems at the same time, and I guess the situation got to be too much for him at some point. He began skipping meetings and ignoring deadlines for the one project he still had—the aforementioned bank project—and ultimately stopped showing up for work at all. I was given the task of taking over his role and cleaning up the mess that he had left with what was now going to be my client. I hate taking on those kinds of assignments, since starting out a consulting assignment with an already irate client is generally somewhat less than amusing. But hey, this was no time to be picky about work assignments.
There was another complicating factor in all this as well. The bank we were working for had also been an investor in XYZ. Not a major investor, but the sum of money that their CEO had committed with great fanfare as part of a "strategic partnership" wasn't trivial, either. That commitment was not without controversy, coming at a time when XYZ was already on the ropes, and Mr. CEO was left with a fair amount of egg on his face when XYZ gave up the ghost just three months later. Word was that he was not terribly happy about this.
So I knew that the meetings I had scheduled for my first on-site visit on a Tuesday morning in early September of 2001 were going to be somewhat challenging, happening as they were under the double shadow of both the overall flame-out of XYZ and the acute mess that had been left by my now ex-colleague. The office I needed to visit was just over the border in a neighboring state, about an hour and a half away. I arranged to get a ride with another of my colleagues who was working with the client. It was a beautiful fall morning as we drove down there.
It was about 9 AM when we got into the building in which we were supposed to meet our other colleagues. I went to find the guy from Phoenix who was in charge of our group to ask where to park myself until my first meeting. He was on the phone with someone, talking in kind of an agitated way and saying things like, "a plane?" Another colleague turned to me to say that apparently an airplane had just flown into one of the World Trade Center Towers in New York.
I had been to the top floors of one of the towers a couple of times for business meetings and I remember watching the traffic of small planes and helicopters flying up and down the Hudson River and thinking how weird it was to be so high up in a building that I was actually looking down at air traffic going by. So when I heard that a plane had hit one, I assumed it must be an accident, that a small plane had somehow veered off course and into one of the towers. But when I finally got online a few minutes later and went to the CNN web site to get some details, I saw a picture of a gash across most of the front of the building that didn't look like it was made by a little four-seater Cessna. About the same time, the same colleague who earlier told me about the plane hitting one tower announced to whomever happened to be listening that another plane had just crashed into the other tower. I remember at that point just sitting down in a state of slack-jawed disbelief, with the feeling of all my blood rushing to my head, and thinking: This is Pearl Harbor.
Somewhere in the midst of all this it was also announced that we all needed to attend a very important meeting at 10 AM with the client's management team. We spent the time until then doing the same thing as everyone else around us, i.e., scouring news web sites to try to find out what was going on. Somewhere in there it was reported that a plane had now crashed into the Pentagon as well. A little before 10 we all trooped off to our client meeting.
As the meeting was getting started, someone stuck his head in the room and announced that one of the WTC towers had collapsed. The meeting itself was a relatively short one. The gist of it was that the bank had had a relationship with XYZ Corp., and XYZ was no more. Nobody in the bank knew anything about this company "Phoenix", and certainly nobody from the bank had asked anyone from this unknown company to come on site, ergo our group had no reason to be there and we were to vacate the premises immediately. On the way out of the meeting room I paused to take in some news updates on one of the TV sets that had now been set up in various places in the office and learned that the other WTC tower had also just collapsed.
Ultimately, the work would resume, since Phoenix had in fact legally taken ownership of all of XYZ's client relationships and contracts, and the project would be brought to a successful conclusion. But for now, we just had to pack up and clear out. The immediate problem I had was that I had gotten a ride there with my one colleague, who had disappeared pretty much right after we arrived, and I hadn't seen him since, nor was he answering his cell phone. So I ended up sitting on a bench outside the office building for the next couple of hours until he eventually turned up and we drove home listening to the radio and trying to make sense of the events of the morning.
I arrived home to begin what would be days of shock, confusion, speculation, rumor-mongering and marathon CNN viewing. The sudden and unexpected demise of the bank project left me without much to do, but nobody was really doing much work anyway in those first few days after the attacks. A lot of people from our office had been traveling to client sites all over the country and were now stranded as a result of air traffic being suspended for the next several days, so the focus of company management was mainly on how to get everyone back home somehow.
That first week or so after the attacks was a very strange interlude. What I remember most of all was that it was just very quiet. Air traffic had come to a standstill, and so the accustomed periodic sound of planes heading to or from Boston Logan Airport, which is around 10–15 miles from my house, was strangely absent. Traffic of other kinds was also pretty low-key. Everyone was in a state of shock, wandering around in stunned silence, infused with a sort of undifferentiated dread about what might happen next. There was mass paranoia about vague, unconfirmed reports of plots to poison reservoirs or spray nerve gas over population centers from crop-dusting planes. The general mood was that we were all just waiting for the other shoe to drop, with no real idea about when or where or how that might happen.
The silence was initially broken for me by groups of people standing on various street corners around town waving signs that said things like, "Honk if you love America!" and cars honking back in response. I sort of understood the thinking and sort of didn't. Was this the best we could come up with in the way of a response?
I of course wondered what this meant for me personally. Were we going to war? If so, with whom? If we've just relived Pearl Harbor, is the right thing to do to enlist in some branch of the military? That latter thought came and went quickly, considering that at that point I was already 40 years old, but it was there nonetheless. If I'm a citizen of this country, and this country is under attack, am I not obligated to do my part in some active way?
What I did expect to happen was to see my taxes raised to pay for whatever response was going to be undertaken. I hardly consider myself to be a hawk with regard to military matters, but I fully expected that part of the response to this event was going to be to rain down death and destruction on its authors, and I did not have a problem with that. And I emphasize: part of the response—more on that later. But I assumed that I and everyone else would be asked to sacrifice in one way or another in order to support what was going to come next.
Remember, this was only a couple of years after Tom Brokaw's book, "The Greatest Generation", had been published. You may not have read the book, but at the time, all the media coverage would have ensured that you nonetheless would have been familiar with its theme: a celebration of the generation that endured the hardships of the Great Depression and then went on to endure the additional hardships of fighting and winning World War Two, a time in which every citizen was called upon to live with rationing of food and strategic materials, to scrimp and save and recycle, to pay his income taxes and the special Victory Tax and buy War Bonds to help finance the war effort, to supplement the food supply by planting victory gardens, and so on.
Donald Did His Part
I was of course asked to do no such thing. On the contrary, my president told me to go out and spend. He wanted me to "[g]et on board. Do your business around the country. Fly and enjoy America’s great destination spots. Get down to Disney World in Florida. Take your families and enjoy life, the way we want it to be enjoyed." Instead of asking me to chip in a few bucks more to help fund the war in Afghanistan, and the one he had just started in Iraq, in 2003 he actually cut my taxes. My president didn't want me to sacrifice a thing. On the contrary, he wanted me to live my life as if absolutely nothing had changed. I know I'm not the first to make this point, but that doesn't make it any less valid: what a missed opportunity. In the wake of 9/11, Americans were ready to do whatever needed to be done, to contribute and to sacrifice whatever it would take to ensure such a thing would not go unanswered. But the leaders of our country just said, "Thanks all the same, but that really won't be necessary. Maybe you should take a nice vacation instead."
The other missed opportunity: the chance for maybe fifteen minutes of introspection. I in no way wish to excuse or apologize for the cold-blooded murder of thousands of people in the service of a political cause infused with a heavy dose of religious extremism. But when the president of the USA boiled the genesis of this event down to this: "Americans are asking 'Why do they hate us?'… They hate our freedoms.", he hardly did the citizens of his country a service. Sure, I realize that from a rhetorical standpoint, a speech given a week and a half after the event was probably not the right time to say, "guys, maybe some part of this was our own fault." But there could have been a policy response that at least implicitly recognized this principle. We could have asked ourselves what these guys were so angry about that they would do such a thing, and whether we should at least consider what implications that might hold for how we comport ourselves. What did we get instead? A misguided effort to try and reshape the Middle East by force, framed in idealistic language but smelling suspiciously of an obsession with settling old scores, executed in breathtaking ignorance of the history and the political and ethnic dynamics of the region and leaving a legacy that I suspect we will all still be chewing on for many years to come.
More than a decade later, I'm reminded of all this more often than I would like to be. For the last nine months or so, every two to three weeks I find myself in the offices of a current client in Jersey City, NJ, which are situated right on the banks of the Hudson River, directly across the river from the World Trade Center site in lower Manhattan. Right outside the building is a monument consisting of a twisted hunk of steel from one of the World Trade Center towers. In the background, across the Hudson, I see the slowly rising frame of the new Freedom Tower, which in the course of various visits to NYC over the years I have watched grow from a muddy hole in the ground to its present state, in which it appears to have reached something approaching its planned final height of 1,776 feet. I think about the horrible spectacle for which the people in that building must have had a front-row seat on that day some eleven-plus years ago. I wonder what it will be like, when that new building has itself been standing complete for a decade or more, to convey to the generation looking up at it what it was like on that day in September of 2001.
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| What Was, What Is, What Will Be |
Very nice.
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