I was sleeping. My best friend called me and told me to get the TV on immediately. I asked why, she said how the first tower had just been hit, so I had Fox on when the 2nd tower got hit. I had called her when Princess Di had been in the auto accident, to turn on her TV. She definitely made the more important call when she let me know about the attack on the Twin Towers. I was glued to the TV from that point on.
I called into work and said I wasn’t coming in that day, as I worked right near downtown Chicago, and the commentators on TV were saying that the Sears Tower in Chicago was one of the possible sites to be hit. Figured it was not the day to go to work in the city. Besides which, you couldn’t have peeled me off from viewing the TV set with a paring knife.
When I did go back to work at the University, an interesting event took place. I worked directly for the Head in a very large math department where many students were from foreign countries (math picks up a lot of foreign students as U.S. students don’t like math). Two of our dept. staff members were walking out of the building directly behind two of our Arab graduate students (one of whom was a part-time staff member himself that I had some contact with). The one student turned to the other and said (he had a camera) paraphrasing, I’m going to take a picture of the Sears Tower while it’s still there, and they both laughed. Our two staff members walking behind them reported them to me to tell the Dept. Head, and they ended up having to apologize in writing for what happened. Made for an uneasy working relationship, to say the least.
Fascinating incident with the Arab students. Thanks for sharing.