I remember vividly. I was lying in bed slowly waking up to another work day. As I’m lying there the radio kicked in and I heard something about a plane striking one of the towers. That fully woke me up for sure. So I went out to the living room of my little apartment and turned on the TV. As I’m watching the news cover the smoking tower, the second plane hit. That kind of broke my brain.

But I still went into work, because bills still needed passing. But nobody did any work at our dying dot-com startup that day. Everyone was just fixated in the news, trying to process what the fuck was going on.

I remember saying to the guy next to me, as we’re trying processing it all “surely they must have known about this, like the intelligence agencies must have got wind of it?” He completely freaked out at me and went on an incoherent rant at me about his his grandpa fought in WWII and how America was the greatest country ever. He apologized the next day. And I get it. We were all traumatized that day. And traumatized people do and say all sorts of things.