September 11, 2001 may have been the most boring work day of my entire life. I had a seriously weird temp job that day, working for the Wisconsin Physicians' Service (WPS). WPS was switching their phone system and they weren't able to put calls on hold, so my job was to take messages. If you called when the phone queue was full, you'd get me, I'd take your name and number, then someone who knew what the hell they were talking about would call you back later. I wasn't really happy with the gig, since no one who called was very happy to talk to me, but there ya go.It wasn't boring to start with but, as the events of the day unfolded, it got boring fast. No one on September 11, 2001 was super-interested in their health insurance. They had other things to worry about. This left me to stare out the window at what was otherwise a clear, beautiful day and wish I had CNN. I knew something was up, something about terrorists and a plane crash and the World Trade Center, but that was about it. I remember seeing a plane plow into one of the towers on the cafeteria TV and wondering how in the hell they got that footage -- I found out later it was the second plane. I didn't know there were two.
I felt ignorant as hell that day. WPS didn't get enough calls to give me anything to do. I might have answered a call an hour -- I'm guessing less. It gave me a lot of time to think, to worry, to wonder. It sucked on so many levels. When I left that day, I went straight home, watched CNN, and did what I thought every good american should do -- get caught up on what happened, get hammered, and get pissed off at Osama bin Laden. Seriously pissed off. Murderously pissed off. My TV is lucky to have survived.
I don't really mean this to be a trip down my Bad Memory Lane. Everyone has a 9/11 story. Most are less boring than mine. Mine seems especially significant because it seemed so damned long. Nothing happened to me that day -- almost literally. And it didn't take me long to get caught up or get drunk. I woke up the next day with an awful hangover, a second very boring day ahead of me (9/11 was my first day on the job), and a very good understanding of the events that happened the previous day. Watching people dive out of skyscraper windows turned out to be not very hard to understand.
I've spent the last 6 years thinking about that day. Not constantly, but I really do think of it at least once a day -- how uncertain our futures are, how people who've never met us judge us collectively and find us guilty individually, how I could -- at pretty much any moment -- find myself diving out the window of a skyscraper to greet certain death below. I think about the differences in certain death and how one certain death is better and more merciful than another.
So, on the eve of the anniversary of 9/11, we were faced with a deep and pressing problem -- did someone hurt Gen. David Freakin' Petraeus's feelings?...
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