... the day the internet fell down ...

I didn't find this site (it is slashdotted at the moment of writing, how appropriate), howardtayler of Schloc Mercenary did. It's an attempt to create weblog of the lives that were lost in the world trade center.

I remember sitting at my desk with a webfeed of WXPN (philadelphia pa alternative/college radio) on when my boss came out to say he's gotten a call from his brother in Brooklyn about the first plane, then trying to get to one site after another, trying to find out what the hells was going on, the webfeed playing music and updates, shock in the voices of the announcers whenever there wasn't music. I remember being thankful that it was something other than the constant feed of the world falling down.

I remember trying to reach my "normal" new sites, msn, fox, abc, cnn, reuters, finally getting the bbc site and the realization dawning that a lot of internet fed through new york, and that the world trade centers were a hub. The TV wasn't any use either. NBC and ABC had their New York broadcast antennae there, CBS had been laughed at for leaving their antennae at the Empire State Building, at least until the first attempt in the '80's to make the Towers fall. Nobody was laughing now, nor, I suspect were they laughing at the firm that instituted monthly evacuation drills after the first bombing attempt.

Then the second plane hit.

But so many blank pages, so many dead ends on the Infobahn.

Slashdot.org came into its own as a news site that day, and the following days, as the towers fell ... later than the hijackers and their planners hoped, and not the way either expected, as the reports came in, a plane that aimed at the white house, banked, and crashed into the pentagon ... into a section that I'd heard was recently renovated and mostly deserted.

All planes were grounded, and reports came that one couldn't be accounted for. I had co-workers at my desk whenever the news came on and the last plane was accounted for ...

A field in western Pennsylvania.

My work day ended, I went home, and because it was tuesday and we had a weekly sewing and gossip gathering scheduled, I went to that. Like donastraya I couldn't stay home. The silence was too loud. CBS was on the air, but ABC and NBC were doing a feed from Fox, I think, or CNN, I forget, they blurred. We talked there, speculating. I remember thinking ... "shit ... and Seven Days is fiction, damn. Wish it was real."

The next day, a co-worker and I stood at the front door of our building/office and I swear I could smell smoke ... my mind insists that it blew south and west almost a hundred miles from Ground Zero. I averted my eyes when I walked past the Princeton Train Station (one end of the Princeton-Junction-and-Back dinky line), because there were photo flyers asking "have you seen me?"

Some things, thankfully, blur with time. Wounds heal, or at least scar over.

I still listen to WXPN on a webfeed due to reception problems, I don't work at the same office, or for the same company, but I'm still within a hundred miles of Ground Zero. Seven Days never came back, though, and I keep thinking that the weight of the world and reality crushed it. There were no seven days of grace to go back and make things right.

But if it meant that September 11, 2001 was just an ordinary day, I'd put up with Ross Perot in the Oval Office.