My job relocated me from San Antonio to Atlanta during Labor Day week of 2001. I spent Labor Day week writing a new class for the client, a one-day class with 8 full hours of technical training on some new equipment they were buying from us. Taught the class for the first time on Sept 10... that entire week, my students would be our client's higher-ranking management types -- they would tell us if we needed to tweak the material at all.
So on Tuesday 9/11, I was teaching that new class for the 2nd time -- class started at 8, and we took our first break around 9am eastern time. I was filling up my coffee cup when one of the employees saw me and said "Oh...you've been in class, so you haven't heard. Someone hijacked a plane..." I grew up in the 60s/70s, when it felt like planes were constantly hijacked and flown to Cuba. She went on to say "They flew it into the WTC."
Break was over right about then, and as the instructor (and a contractor), I had to set a good example. So I was first back into the classroom, but as soon as we were all together, we took a field trip to the break room upstairs where all 3 TVs were tuned to CNN. We got there in time to watch the 2nd plane hit. I remember watching one of the towers fall, but can't tell you if we saw it live or as a replay.
I can pretty well guarantee that none of my students remember anything from our class that day. I didn't have the authority to cancel the class, and it would have been almost 2 months before they could have retaken it if we had cancelled it. So we continued on, but all of our 10 minutes break were 20 minutes that day, and we had more of them than usual.
Most of the folks that I met here in my first 2 weeks in ATL were transplanted new yorkers. One of my co-workers here was from NYC, had 2 aunts that worked at the Towers, and a cousin or niece that attended school at that elementary school. He went home as soon as he heard the news. They later found one aunt in the hospital with a broken back, the niece/cousin was not in school that day and was safe with her grandmother, and his other aunt was never found.
My entire support system was in San Antonio, where I'd lived for the previous 11 1/2 years. I was alone in a strange city, in a hotel room, just me and the tv news and my laptop, wishing I was still in the military so I could help go after the people who attacked our country. In the 10 years I'd been out, it was the only time I seriously wished I were still in.
