What I remember most from 9/11

It was a surreal day. I wasn't working that day and I slept in. When I awoke, I remember turning on the news and seeing the immediate aftermath of the attacks. I left the TV on and quickly went to CNN.com to see what it said. CNN.com had completely revamped their website to focus almost exclusively on the attacks. They used gigantic fonts for the headlines and their stories were changing and being updated on the fly.

Three other items of note that stood out for me personally. I live and work in or around Atlanta, so I wasn't anywhere near New York or DC. However, I had some colleagues who worked in both of those cities. A few days after 9/11, I was speaking on the phone with one of those colleagues who lived in New Jersey but worked in New York City. She told me that she had been driving back and forth to work in the days after 9/11 and kept noticing the large numbers of cars at the train/subway stations that never moved. The cars were there when she went to work and the same cars were still there...unmoved...when she returned home from work. It dawned on her that those were cars of people who died or were still missing in that time period right after 9/11.

Another colleague of mine in DC told me how some folks in the office had been in their cars that morning and had seen the low-flying plane (Flight 77) that would eventually crash into the Pentagon. So much for that missile theory that the moronic conspiracy theorists keep pushing.

Finally, one of my colleagues in the Atlanta office lost a sister on Flight 77. Her sister, who worked for a defense contractor in DC, was flying out on a business trip that day. She rarely flew, but she had the misfortune of being on the plane that crashed into the Pentagon. They were eventually able to identify some of her remains, but it was a harrowing situation for my co-worker and her family and in-laws.

Many lives were and families were changed forever that day. I can only pray that we continue to fight back against those who seem hell-bent on destroying us with any weapons they can dream up.