Today is a day to remember. A day hard to forget, a day that changed the world. Not just changed the world, it altered history in a major way. As I sit here contemplating continuing on with this blog at the fear of being criticized for even bringing it up, I can’t help but remember where I was 25 years ago.
“Mr. Smith, good morning! How you been?” I asked as I rolled a small cart with a new desktop computer, and state of the art Cisco VOIP telephone into the mahogany-lined office of a high profile investment broker. “Mr Reed! Great to see you! You just caught me before I was heading out for a 9am appointment. Thanks for replacing this thing, it’s been giving me the fits”, he exclaimed as he flipped his tie around his neck. He continued, “What’s happening today for you guys in IT?”. I mumbled, “It’s a crazy day today. We just got in a hundred of these new desktops and now trying to finish up getting them out before the weekend, which I don’t think will happen.” Mr. Smith sort of took it in, and kind of sarcastically made me feel like being an IT wizard was something to behold by saying, “I don’t even have a clue – you guys are so smart with computers, I don’t know how you understand it all”. Was it me, or was it a light dusting of patronization? Hard to tell with his television on in the background and the reflection of his 7 series special edition BMW reflecting the sunlight through the building into my eyes.
Mr. Smith was an astounding figure. He was head and shoulders above the rest, literally. I’m 6’1″, and he was easily 4 or 5 inches taller. I recall how crispy his suit looked on him. A deep, custom tailored pinstripe blue with a grey vest and underneath was probably a $500 collared shirt. His shirts were so impeccable, where the collar contrasted a different color, along with his sleeve cuffs. What stood out the most to me was his cufflinks and how bold they made the stiff cuffs of his sleeves pop. His hair was perfect, jawline unmovable and skin not too soft yet not too rough. This guy was on-point.
I approached him with my hand out, shook his and told him, “If you don’t mind, I’m gonna hop under your desk and take everything out and get out of your hair in just a few.” Mr. Smith was very busy, as he was a top producer at the investment firm I had worked at. I won’t say any names, but this firm was eventually raided by US Marshalls a few years later for, let’s just say, practices unbecoming of a high profile investment firm, and the building in Houston where it once stood, that beautiful, marbled and gold-ladened building, a place I loved for a brief 2 years, gone forever.
So here I am, underneath his desk unravelling a spiderweb of crusty network, power, keyboard and mouse cables. And that’s when it happened. I hear an “Oh my God!” from across the hall. The interior of this gorgeous building comprised mostly of glass, framed by old-money wood, so that you could essentially see all throughout the floor, with the exception of the some rooms, obviously. I poked my head up above the desk made for kings to see what happened, and there I sat on the emerald green carpeted floor of his office staring up at the wall mounted TV, a well known news network showing live replay footage of the second flight crashing into the World Trade Center.
At first, I didn’t really know what I was looking at. One building was already smoking and now a plane hitting the other building? What’s going on? I got up and abandoned my post for a moment to join the others crowded around one of another 50 TV’s throughout that floor and asked “What happened?” to the group. No one even acknowledged me, much less answered. “The silence was deafening”, they say, and they’re right. Before tinnitus set in years later for me, I could have heard a pin drop across the way, but instead it was the sound of disbelief, the roar of confusion and the screams of terror in the streets as the minutes followed. Needless to say, Mr. Smith never made that 9am appointment. How could anyone, when the world stood still?
You know the rest of the story. A story with millions of different accounts. Accounts that can take you back, unlocking that memory of what you were doing then. But, I can’t close without saying, our world is a completely different place now, no matter what you believe – we’re better than this. I digress, and I hope, at the very least, we honor those by never forgetting our past.
Where were you on September 11, 2001? What do you remember, and what will you never forget?
Randall Reed, President & CEO, Dataseti