jennings rampage

Third in the series.

Today I miss my former coworkers.

Back when I had a job, I worked at the corner of Church and Dey, right across the street from WTC 1, or the “North Tower” in the vernacular of our times. I wasn’t down there when all the shit went down, and it would be hard to imagine a scenario where I could have been down there, since I’m such a late sleeper. (I was scheduled to be at the office at 10am, but I was just about ready to walk out the door at 9:55am when I got an e-mail from Eli informing me that he was OK that was my first sign that anything was wrong. I clicked on the TV in time to see WTC 2 collapse.)

I actually thought for a moment about whether or not I should go down there. I had already been late to work on Monday, and that was the day that I had been promoted out of the tech support department, so clearly I thought it would be a bad idea to be too much later on my first day as a project manager. Since that was already shot, I didn’t want to exacerbate the problem by loitering in my bedroom. Oh, and yeah, I had no idea of the magnitude of the disaster.

So after weighing the circumstances (not that there was any chance that I could have put myself in harm’s way at this point), I sat back down and e-mailed my manager and told her that I’d be down later that day after the situation calmed down a little. And I e-mailed my old group and my new group and hoped that they were safe. And I called my mom.

By the time all that pondering and e-mailing and calling was over, it was 10:28am, and WTC 1 went down. That’s when I freaked out.

Concurrent with the outpouring of love and support on these very message boards, my coworkers and I updated everyone on where they were and when they got home safely via the company’s e-mail system, which had power up until 5pm or so when WTC 7 collapsed and took out the power grid for that side of the island. And then I was just about completely isolated from them.

Joe and I spent the day together after he evacuated to my apartment. We had a splendid time eating sandwiches at the now-gone cafe on the corner of 66th St and 1st Av, hoarding food and water at the Gristedes across the street, and trying and failing to donate blood at the center on 67th St. (That neighborhood was so convenient!) Then we went back to my apartment and watched wrestling on TiVo, just to take our minds off of it. (But as I recall, we flew through the two hour show in maybe thirty minutes, and got right back to the coverage.)

Joe got back to Brooklyn, and I got through to my manager over the phone later that evening to let her know that I was ready and willing and champing at the bit to work. I really was. She thanked me for touching base, but told me that I wouldn’t be needed until we were able to get back to the office on Dey St. (We didn’t return to Dey until the middle of January. None of us really knew what was going on.)

But I finally did get the call to report to work on Friday. It was our own version of the recovery effort — fourteen straight sixteen hour days with about fifty people in an office designed for twenty in Englewood Cliffs, NJ. Our data center was on Dey St, which was a pretty stupid place for a data center, but naturally, everyone was much smarter after the terrorist attack. As the old building evacuated, one of the systems guys had the presence of mind to pick up a handful of tape backups from the night before. (Too bad he didn’t have the presence of mind to shut the window.) The systems people regrouped at the NJ facility, which was a skeleton of what should have been a disaster recovery site. (Hey, corporate bigwigs, if you haven’t already, check your DR plans. They can save a big headache later.) They had network between the two sites until, oh, 5pm or so when WTC 7 went down, and they were left with a big hole in the data.

The president of the company led what he called “commando missions” past the police barracades and into the Dey St building with a screwdriver, a cardboard box, and a handful of static bags to abscond with as many hard drives from the server farm as possible. I have no idea how, but he made three seperate trips and got every single hard drive out of there. I have no idea how he did it. The manager of my new group, who would be one of the first people I’d pick for my side in a barfight, rode shotgun on a commando mission, and couldn’t bring himself to come close enough to the disaster to make it inside the building.

Armed with these hard drives and a fleet of brand new servers shipped overnight, we had to build a new data center. Database servers were built, the old data was DTSed over, the web servers were built, the software was configured, and the whole mess was tested. Repeat about 300 times. Configuration was done mostly from memory. It was, at the same time, absolutely no fun and the most fun I’ve ever had. Yelling, screaming, sleeping on the floor, juggling the phones, eating truckloads of fast food, watching the strong survive and the weak go home. It was a bonding experience.

One night in the middle of all of this at about 2am, the president of the company decided he was going home for a night, and offered me a ride back to Manhattan. What else were we going to talk about? I joked with him about how my oversleeping gene finally paid off, and said I’m glad I wasn’t down there. He turned, looked me in the eye, and said, “I’m glad you weren’t down there, too.”

Today I miss those guys. Three of them lost family. My thoughts are with them, but there’s no way for me to let them know that. Not the way I left, hoo boy.