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My September 11

On that Tuesday twenty years ago…my day began before dawn as a passenger on a commuter train into Manhattan. I was preparing for what was supposed to be a brief morning consulting gig.1 My clients were investment bankers 2, themselves day-commuters from their Connecticut branch offices to the corporate headquarters of “XY Capital”, in a skyscraper near Grand Central Station. Once arrived at Penn Station, where the NJ Transit commuter lines terminate, I had an easy subway ride uptown.

We had no sooner introduced ourselves (myself, two bankers, and a second consultant with a more senior and more general industrial background 3) and started the preliminaries more-or-less on time at 9 AM, when someone burst in the door and shouted that there was a security issue and we were to leave the building immediately. A climb down many, many flights of stairs followed.

Once outside, we found ourselves in unreal city4. Crowds of people were standing around in the street, most dialing away at their cell phones (all futile, as the cell networks crashed from excess demand long before the antennas on the North Tower fell). A reassuring number of New York City police had appeared where none had been present a few minutes earlier. There was no sense of danger from the crowd. Shock and confusion, no disruption or panic.

One of the bankers had the good sense to go into a hotel where he was a frequent customer. He quickly got us a summary (partial at that point) of what had happened. He also had found that the city was completely isolated, with all transit shut down and all bridges/tunnels closed, and that there was zero possibility of finding a hotel room. No leaving, no staying, no outside communications.

What was an odd set of engineers and investment bankers to do under such unlikely circumstances? Well, we decided to walk uptown, away from the obvious smoke and fumes and the possible crowd panic (which fortunately did not happen). After many blocks, we came upon an Italian restaurant5 which was - improbably - still open, although only the restaurant owner was there. The owner obligingly cooked up some rather good pasta and salad for our lunch. Served with a few glasses of wine, of course. We then proceeded to hold our meeting as planned, right there in the empty restauarant..

Eventually, we heard on the restaurant’s tiny TV (only CBS was left on the air) that the travel shutdown had been lifted and that we could and should go home. By then it was early evening, and the light was fading.

The NJ Transit conductor did not collect the return ticket.

The footnotes are only partly facetious, I wanted to tell the story without slogging though the details.

  1. My educational background is in Chemical Engineering, and I spent the last half of my career with a technical specialty in fiber recovery from printed papers (recycled office papers, as well as newsprint and magazines). I first had regular corporate R&D jobs (although ones with extremely high travel requirements), but later did independent consulting work. ↩︎

  2. The bankers' bosses at “XY Capital” had bought into a paper recycling plant in the upper Midwest, at pennies on the dollar of the original construction cost. They had still over-paid, and needed detailed engineering documentation of why their deal was a bad one. This all was presumably so the “asset” could be written off as a tax loss. I do not know what the ultimate outcome of all this was. ↩︎

  3. As a two-consultant meeting, this was at least of minor importance to “XY Capital”, although the sums involved were relative pocket change, or perhaps even pocket lint, in their greater scheme of things. The two bankers were quite junior employees. ↩︎

  4. A semi-gratuitous T.S.Eliot “Wasteland” allusion. Actually, this is what came to my mind at that moment. ↩︎

  5. I greatly regret that I do not remember the name of the restaurant. ↩︎