Everyone Has a Story, This is Mine

(To all of those who wrote Tribute Blogs, I commend you. God Bless America and those we lost, but never forgotten)

*

I used to be a Door-to Door salesperson a few years back. Everyday I would get a map and I would have to visit every company within those borders and try to change their phone service to ours. It blew, so by the Summer of 2001, I quit.

I was looking for work all summer. (Hardly trying really). Most of the time you could find me driving up and down the East Coast visiting friends and slacking off majorly.

But as you know when Fall comes it brings with it this ominous call for responsibility... It was time for me to buckle down and start doing something.

This one particular Tuesday I had 2 interviews. One of them was over an hour away at 8:30 a.m. (Drag!) and the other was pretty local at around 11:30 a.m. (Sweet!).

So you know how friends and family are...

They all wanna know, "So where do you work now?", "What do you do?" yada... yada... (Which is incredibly annoying to me)

But anyways, the night before everyone wished me luck and I went to bed. In the morning I woke up pretty early to start my day.

When I say woke up, I really mean that I opened one of my eyes, looked at the alarm clock, and pushed it back a few hours.

I did get up a little while later around 8 a.m. or so. Brushed my teeth, went downstairs, made some coffee, and went to the computer room to check my AOL mail.

The welcome screen says "Twin Towers Destroyed" and it showed this little tiny picture. I was like "WTF?!?"

At first, I seriously thought it was a joke, kind of like that Orson Wells radio prank that happened back in the day.

Then I hear my mother screaming, "Turn on the TV!" and that's when I knew. This was no joke.

I wonder what happened to all of them, and to Stephanie. She was the one who was going to be interviewing us that day, as a group, for the preliminary.

How many in my group showed up? How many were not Lazy like me and were there 8:30 am Floor 55 Tower 2 with this Stephanie woman as promised?

Her name is always etched in my memory. We had only spoken on the phone a few days prior.

It's a weird kind of guilty feeling...pretty indescribable.

Now living so close to NY, all cell phones and the like wouldn't work until after 1 or 2 pm. That's when all the phone calls started pouring in.

All my friends had thought the worst. We couldn't contact each other, and they all thought that I was gone.

I survived by being irresponsible. How is that fair? That strange sort of guilt always comes around again this time of year.