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I got to work early that day since I was supposed to fly to San Antonio the next morning for 3 days of insurance hell. My computer was all jacked up, so I was on the phone with one of our IT people when someone came in my office and told me that a plane had crashed into one of the towers. The IT person and I talked about it while she was working on my computer trying to get it to print, and we thought it was a small plane that maybe got lost in fog or something. It wasn't until 15 minutes later that I could go into the kitchen to see what was on TV. One of my coworkers was thinking that it was a small plane, but as soon as I saw the hole, I knew that it had to be a jet at the very least, although I thought that it might have been a regional one since I didn't have a very good idea of the size of the buildings.
I was back on the phone with IT when the second plane hit. One of my assistants ran into my office to tell me what happened, and I hung up the phone to get to the kitchen. When I watched the replay the first time, I knew that it was terrorism, although in the first couple of minutes I thought it was domestic crazies instead of foreign ones.
At the time, our office was a block from the Sears Tower, and there were all sorts of rumors flying around about what was going on there. I had some good friends/business associates working in offices there, and one called me when they were being evacuated since we had a big deal cooking at the time. She was already outside and we started talking about what would happen to the insurance marketplace and whether or not it would kill the soft market we had had for 12 years. In fact it had done so, and over the next few months I worked harder than I ever had before.
At 10:00, we started sending people home, and the phones started ringing off the hooks with clients and vendors wanting know what we were doing. By 11:30 it was just me and my boss trying to triage as many deals as possible while military jets flew over downtown. It was scary. At 11:30, our CEO called and got me. He basically told me I was fired if I didn't leave the building within the next 5 minutes and that I needed to take my boss with me. We left and ended up going to El Jardin by Wrigley Field because of their margaritas (1 will get you drunk, 2 will make you comatose). We had lunch and margaritas, and I went home to my apartment to try to get my head straight. It was a beautiful day in Chicago, and quiet like a early Sunday morning in the middle of summer, only broken up by military jets streaking overhead. At 3, a friend and I went for the longest run I'd been on in 6 years and just talked about what happened and possible responses. It was an absolute pleasure to leave my cell phone at home since it had basically been ringing nonstop from 11 to 3.
Crazily enough, my first date with my wife was that Saturday afterwards. I remember telling her at the beginning that regardless of how it turned out, it would always be memorable because of the week's events.
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"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety." - B. Franklin
"There ought to be limits to freedom." - George W. Bush
"We have met the enemy and he is us." - Pogo
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