My 9/11

For this post, I have to jump up a year chronologically. I needed to publish this today to coincide with this dark moment in our nation's history and set up the scene.

In August of 2001, all of the dispatch agents at NDC's Balboa call center had to relocate to the Cheaspeake building. Everyone who was over there had to go work in this one section that was on the same server as when we were at Balboa.

We had been at the Chesapeake location just a few weeks and were finally getting adjusted to the new routine on Tuesday, 09/11/01. Most of the staff was already in place taking calls. Camd and I were discussing something at our Supervisor station. Right before 6am, someone came running in and told us that a plane hit the World Trade Center. We were rather stunned. We thought it might have been an accident. At the time, I thought it was a single-engine plane that hit the building and didn't cause much damage. A little later, we found out it was a passenger jet that struck the building. This was getting scary.

But we went about our daily routine. A few minutes later, someone came in and told us another jet had hit the other building. Camd said, "Uh-oh. That wasn't an accident." Suddenly, our call volume shot up. You may recall that a lot of our clients were people who worked on Wall Street. EVERYBODY was trying to find out if their friends and loved ones were alright. Camd told me I needed to hop on the phone and start taking calls.

About 30 minutes later, we found out that another plane had crashed into the Pentagon. At this point, I recalled a panel from a "Shazam!" comic book in which alien invaders were suddenly taking over the Earth. A bystander shouts, "Has the world gone insane?" This was what I was feeling at this moment as I continued to take one call after another, not knowing if they would ever be received or acknowledged. This feeling deepened as we got word of the fourth crash. I wondered if there were going to be more.

One of the messages I took was someone informing the client that one of the planes was heading to Los Angeles. Now, he was stating that one of the planes involved in the WTC crash was going to Los Angeles. (It was later determined that three of the four jets were going there.) I was a professional, took the message and sent it out, but I started panicking at this. To me, it sounded like there was a jet headed to Los Angeles that instant that was going to crash somewhere. That was close to us! Was a jet going to come crashing down in San Diego? We were still expecting more planes to come falling out of the sky at any given moment and any given location. We had no way of knowing when this would end. A few minutes later, I figured out what he was saying and stopped panicking. But I still waited for things to get worse.

As the day went on, we found out it was just the four jets. But just because the crashing was over didn't mean we were finished. We still had lots of calls to handle. I had gotten off the phone to go check on everyone. As I was walking around, I saw one dispatch agent go into hysterics. She was SCREAMING and holding onto Mond, our workforce manager. Mond was not known for being a warm person, so it was unusual for someone to reach out to her like that. She looked at me as if to say, "What do I do?" She just put her arm around her and tried to comfort her.

I heard about one dispatch agent getting a caller who tried to leave a message, but kept bursting out in tears while trying to dictate. That call took about 20 minutes to complete. Somebody wasn't going to hit the goal AHT that day.

As the morning went on, I could poke my head in and out of the break room, where I could watch coverage on TV. I tried not to get too wrapped up as I needed to get on the phone and answer calls.

One of the few times I was at the Supervisor station, the phone rang. It was the daughter of one of our agents. Schools were being let out for the day and she needed a ride home. This particular agent had an attendance problem, so before I got her on the phone, I had to go to the Manager and ask if it would be held against her if she left early. He said it wouldn't, so I was able to go to her and let her know that her daughter was on the phone and that she could leave to pick her up without any consequences.

One of NDC's Vice Presidents used to be a local TV news anchor. He called his old station to send a crew out to do a story on us answering all these calls. They interviewed him and the CEO of the company.

I did eventually go home. I had just recently gotten access to the Internet through AOL. I went on to see what everyone was saying about the attacks. Most of it didn't make any sense. We didn't have all the details, so it was still a lot of rumor and innuendo. I tried not to get too involved in the conversation. I just read what everyone else was writing.

A while later, Abed and Qued came over. The look on their faces told me they had experienced a lot of the emotions I had gone through. We talked for a bit and Abed asked to get on the computer. He wanted to look stuff up. I was just watching TV at the time. Later, Fraz came over. (We had reconciled our friendship within the last six months.) She held the opinion that this was something the US deserved to have happen a long time ago. I could see her point, but I wasn't in the mood for that discussion after talking to people who may have lost their loved ones. I kept my end of the conversation to a minimum while we continued to watch TV coverage. I saw the story about NDC. They featured the interview with the former anchor, but did not run a clip of the CEO.

I didn't know if I was going to be able to sleep that night, but I somehow managed to get a few hours of slumber in. I woke up the next morning for work, not knowing what to expect.

I don't remember a lot of what happened to me on 09/12. I do recall telling Camd that there was footage of the first plane hitting the WTC. He was surprised because he hadn't seen it.

We felt the effects of 9/11 for a few more weeks after that. People continued to leave messages that were likely never returned. A few times, I was taking calls and I would get queries about whether certain people still had accounts. All I could tell them was that the accounts were still active, but that didn't really mean good news. It just meant someone hadn't gotten around to canceling those contracts. Those in charge of that stuff probably had more important things to do than worry about ending service for people who may have perished.

But that day laid the foundation for many more changes that would occur in my life. After that day, I found I had a long road ahead of me and I'm still traveling on it.