In IT, its pretty common practice to install changes with any risk involved to production servers in a scheduled change window. For my customer in Manhattan, Merrill Lynch that is the second Sunday of the month. The plan was to make the change during the Sunday change window, spend the first 24 hours on site as support through their first on-line and batch cycle, and then leave to my next assignment in San Mateo, CA tuesday morning.
There were pre-reqs the customer had to install for the upgrade that they did not, mostly device drivers and microcode updates. So my change was cancelled and we used the change window to install the pre-reqs. I went back to my room at the Marriott World Trade Center late Sunday/early Monday - depending on your point of view.
At 1 pm, we had a replay meeting to develop a new deployment schedule. I changed my flight from United 93 to United 921 and left Newark at 6:30 pm.
Nothing about these events were unusual. I often work weekends. About 80% of the time, I end up changing my flight to something earlier or later. Its the nature of the business.
That changed the next morning.
I woke up at 5:30 and hit the shower. By the time I'm done, my cell phone has 27 messages. What sets me off is three are from my wife and 2 are from my father. This worried me. I'm now thinking something has happened to my father, so I call my wife's cell and my father answers it.
You can imagine what that call was like. Where was I, was I safe, etc. I have no idea what the hell is going on. Finally, someone in the background tells me to turn on the news. I turn it on seconds before Tower Two collapses.
I can't adequately describe my feelings at the time. 24 hours earlier, I was in a conference room in that building. Without any kind of forewarning, I am now watching it collapse. People I had worked with the previous two days were being killed before my eyes. This scene will become a recurring nightmare for many years to follow.
And just when you think you're completely numb and nothing more can penetrate and make it worse, it does when some time later we hear that my original flight was highjacked and crashed in Pennsylvania.
For the rest of the week, I am alone in a hotel room waiting for flights to resume. IBM has closed their campus to non-essentials, meaning me, so I have nothing to do but think and watch the news. I've never been is such a deep depression before.
You look for something positive to come out of it. There isn't anything. Traveling is now far more of a hassle, but I get it. But still, are we safer? TSA hasn't stopped a single hijacker. Traveling by air is now the willing submission to a confined police state. We have to be right every single time to prevent it, they only have to be right once to succeed.