On September 10th

"Where were you when...?" It's a common question asked about traumatic events whether one was present personally for the trauma or not. Hearing about them or watching them through mass media is enough. Tomorrow there will be many conversations like that all across America, and for that matter, the world.

For me, the "where was I?" starts with the day before. I remember pretty much my whole day of Monday, September 10, 2001. I had woken up and left early to drive to Cleveland for a sales meeting with a customer. It was a beautiful late summer/early fall day, just as the next day would turn out to be.

During my drive, I'm sure I juggled around in my mind things like everything still left to do before the birth of our first child about a month away. I don't remember all the details of the sales meeting, although I do remember that I wrote a great reply to the customer's RFP when all was said and done because we won the deal. It was a sales meeting, and I was just the engineer, so I got lunch bought for me too.

I spent the middle of the afternoon at my company's Akron office beginning to pull things together for the RFP response that would have to be written. The drive home was as awesome as that of the morning: windows down, sunroof open, tunes cranking.

That night, I'm sure I spent some time watching the news of the day. You know, that big story about a congressman having an affair with the young woman who had disappeared with nary a trace. Remember that? I probably stayed up a little later than usual too, as I didn't have to be anywhere until 10:00 the next day.

All in all, not a really memorable day. So why is it still clear in my mind?

I think it's because I always knew September 11, 2001 was going to happen. No, I didn't predict that Islamofascist terrorists were going to hijack four planes and turn them into manned, 150-ton cruise missiles. I had written a column back in August of 1990 for the Carnegie Mellon University newspaper, The Tartan, which laid out how the disintegration of the bipolar, Cold War-esqe world was putting us all into great danger, as the then "Iraq I" crisis showed quite clearly. (Originally, I was going to quote myself, but frankly I'm appalled by my pathetic writing style and juvenile utopian presuppositions about governance. I'll spare you  my writing of 21 years ago.)

I knew that airline security was a joke (actually, it still is, but that's a topic for another time). For a period from summer 2000 to early 2001 I zig-zagged across the country doing installation work that required me to travel with a lot of tools. Two, 60-pound tool chests to be exact. When I checked the cases, here's the conversation that usually transpired:

Airline Employee: "These are really heavy."
Me: "Yeah, I know. It costs another $40 per case. Here's the credit card."
Airline Employee: "What's in them?"
Me: "Tools."
Airline Employee: "Oh, ok."

And away they went on the conveyor to find their way onto the plane. I made somewhere in the vicinity of 50 flights with those cases and once - just once - I remember being asked to take them for extra x-ray inspection. Not once was I ever asked to open them, and I know they were never opened as each was secured with two padlocks - those pre-"TSA Approved" locks we used to have the freedom to use to protect our private property when travelling. False senses of security abounded.

Every now and then, we'd be reminded that we were at risk: Khobar Towers, the USS Cole, and others. They were tragic - and far away. Every time a terrorist struck at Americans, didn't those oceans separating us from the rest of the world seem all the wider?

None of us knew when or where the attack would come, or if it would, or if did we probably thought it just wouldn't be a big deal in the long run. I'd like to think that I wasn't personally made intellectually complacent as to the threat by the comparative insignificance of the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center, but the mental construct of "How bad could it be?" either produced a cataclysm too horrific to actually comprehend the aftermath (i.e. a nuclear attack) or another ho-hum event that while locally tragic to those directly affected, would depart from our daily news and concern in a few days. What would happen the next day just couldn't or wouldn't happen.

September 10, 2001 was the last day that we Americans were ignorant as to, "How bad could it be?"