Good morning, everyone! I hope you had a great weekend! It was a somber one for us as we remembered 9/11. The twentieth anniversary has come and gone, and like anyone who was in grade school or older on 9/11/2001, I remember that day.
I was still working for the original ISP and what many Americans thought of as "the Internet," AOL (America Online). As usual for me, I didn't watch the news in the morning. (This was before social media. Twitter and Facebook were dreams not yet launched; you didn't check your phone for news.) I just got dressed, hopped in my 300ZX convertible (with the top down), and drove to work in Tucson, Arizona. I cranked my tunes on my CD player and got my mind ready for the work day. I had no idea the catastrophe that had occurred. I was my usual happy-go-lucky self.
I arrived at work and my team was gone. No one was in the IT office. That was super odd — here was gregarious me wandering the hall, smiling, wondering why it was so quiet, and I heard people talking in one of the conference rooms. I walked in, and they were watching the news on a TV they'd wheeled in. I loudly said, "Hello, everyone! Waiting for me for the party?!"My friend Dave replied, "How can you be so happy? Don't you see what's happening?!?!" Obviously I had not. They filled me in. I was shocked, like everyone so far away from the disaster. How could that be happening in America?
I was completely blown away. At that point in my life, I hadn't even ever gone to New York City. Frankly, for a kid from Arizona, it was all really hard to fathom. We only had one skyscraper downtown, so the scope of the Twin Towers was hard to understand. We didn't even know how many people had perished yet, but the
level of the tragedy was unimaginable.
My team was able to get back to work. AOL itself was affected by outages and other problems related to the buildings going down in New York as we had data centers and dial-up access there. We were getting calls from people trying to connect with friends and family through AOL Instant Messenger since calls weren't going through on landlines or cell phones. The AOL teams in Tucson, and around the world, had to take care of our members, and they did. They did an amazing job.
We will never forget what happened on 9/11, but I'm proud of how America came together afterwards. Republican, Democrat, whatever, it didn't matter. All that matters is we're Americans, and we'll work through it together. We'll support each other. We'll help each other. We'll continue to do so!
