9/11 remembered

This post dedicated to RantWoman's memories of 9/11

First, the sole memorial article RantWoman read this year. The article is about a picture and what happened with the picture and a journalist's quest to identify the man in the picture.
Who was the falling man from 9/11?

RantWoman is happy to concede that boiling down an event of the scale of 9/11 to a couple case / control observations and a crack about deconstructivist art / engineering could register as a little odd.

The case / control moments, documented somewhere in RantWoman's blogs:

--The director of security at Dean Witter was a big believer in drills. He drilled people about evacuations. RantWoman has no information about drills at Cantor Fitzgerald in the other tower. No employees of Dean Witter were killed. Hundreds from Cantor Fitzgerald died.

--There were 8 blind people in the towers. The 4 with guide dogs all survived. The four cane users all perished.

RantWoman admits to fascination with weird engineering moments such as the collapse of Galloping Gertie, the old Tacoma Narrows bridge. Despite the human and geopolitical horror of 9/11, RantWoman humbly concedes macabre interest in collapsing modern skyscrapers basically with burning jet fuel. Not an experiment RantWoman wants to see repeated, but...

The day of the event, RantWoman and her former cat, the Queen of Meow awoke with the alarm clock radio news: RantWoman did not believe the news and went back to sleep. When RantWoman awoke again, the news was the same and RantWoman decided it was time to turn on the TV. RantWoman lingered and realized that she was just going to be late to work. The towers had already collapsed by the time RantWoman left for her bus. RantWoman needed to transfer downtown. The tunnel platforms were full of people who had arrived on commuter buses but were getting sent home early. RantWoman thought of just not going to work but was glad she did, merely for bearing witness.

On 9/11 RantWoman was a technical contractor (programmer) working on commercial aviation manufacturing network performance indicators at a large local aerospace company. The job was everything that is good and bad about being a contractor: software not quite up to date, not entirely clear the point of RantWoman's reporting tasks, more options for cultural mismatch than if one gets fully "onboarded" with one's team. RantWoman did think to make a reasonable accommodations request and got a large monitor to do her work on.  All summer there were signs everywhere telling people to please be sure and wear their badges, to pay attention to people who appeared Middle Eastern, and to report anything suspicious.

By the time RantWoman got to work on 9/11, not much actual work was occurring. People were mostly watching various videos. People were also just OUTRAGED that the company's product, commercial aircraft, had been turned into weapons.

The other moment stuck in RantWoman's memory from that day: almost everyone in the office told a co-worker from India to please be careful for her own safety because none of us could guarantee that she would not be harassed or worse. She seemed to shrug off the advice; RantWoman was just impressed with the consistency of the message from several different voices.

RantWoman did not last long at that job. The bottom dropped out of the commercial aviation market. For a time there was the possibility that RantWoman's group would get assigned to a fighter plane contract. That contract did not materialize but RantWoman also did not want to be working on fighter planes so RantWoman and the job parted ways. RantWoman is pointedly not commenting about 18 years of war since 9/11; for a further moment of plain-spokenness....