We arrived in NYC on September 8th checked into the hotel my company had booked and spent the evening dining with some other managers from Maine who were here for the conference. I shared with them my nightmare vacation as they all had been jealous before I left work in Belfast that I had scheduled my vacation before the seminar and had extended my vacation to end in NYC. The next day September 9th we attended the seminar and had no free time in the afternoon as the managers from the unit on the 11th floor had made plans for a fraud analyst to do a speaking engagement for us. My husband felt that the bad karma of Virginia Beach had followed us as our tickets to our show went unused with the addition of the unplanned speaker I had to attend for work. The next morning was September 10th and the meeting broke up at 11am. My husband had gone to the mall under the trade center so we met up out in front of the National Trade Center. We asked a stranger which my husband insisted I not do to take our photo in front of the trade center and he stood there with me smiling whispering in my ear the guy was going to run and steal our camera the way our luck was running. He didn’t and our digital camera dated that photo September 10th, 2001. We decided that we could not handle anymore disasters and had already checked out of our hotel and decided to haul for Maine. We arrived home at 1am and the next morning I left at 5am headed to Belfast to work at MBNA. I worked in building 8 and my office was at the end of a room the size of a football field and as far as the eye could see were workers in cube offices attached to phones by headsets serving our customers. Then at about 8:50 am the phones stopped ringing as if an ominous foreshadowing of what was to come in the next minutes. The reps began to stand up in their cubes like moles in the wack a mole game popping up with blank stares. Then I went on to the main floor where the other managers were gathering and I heard something about a hijacked plane. Then the security guards came in wearing guns and the protective emergency blinds began to go down over the windows. The 1000 moles wear staring in silence as TV’s were rolled in from our Technology rooms and we turned them on just in time to see the plane fly behind Katie and Matt on the Today Show. We stood in horror and then the ripple of crying began across the expanse of the football field room. I saw my coworkers hugging, crying and we all moved closer to the sets as we watched unable to look away. I think to witness a disaster with others is somehow even more horrific because tough people become people you didn’t recognize and quiet managers who never spoke were trying to maintain control. We watched through the 2nd plane and of course the collapsing towers and not one of our 1000 phones rang and were even a thought in our minds. We held hands and everyone spoke in hushed voices as my thoughts ran to the workers in the tower on 11th floor. Finally a voice of reason the Vice President called us all to attention and turned off the TV’s telling us the company had decided to close down as was the stock market and we all will be released to go home shortly as they were waiting for more news as they still weren’t sure at this point if the country was under attack. The waiting for an hour was excruciating as people began to call relatives on their cell phones and discuss what this all meant. This was my 3rd and final disaster that I thought I had escaped when I arrived home from my vacation.
I believe things do happen in 3’s and I believe people can have bad luck but I didn’t know what to think of the past two weeks as I spent the next two days at home. These disasters in NYC had rocked me to my core and I felt that my world would never be the same. I continued to think of the parents of the child who would never go to school and the poor woman recovering from her injuries and how this must be another burden for them. Then President Bush, fireman, policeman, and the common man began to rise
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