Started sending the resume around. The market may be depressed but so am I and this place is mostly the cause. My wife, having listened to me bitch and moan after work, tore a page out of her O magazine describing six signs it's time to change jobs. I answer 'yes' to four and vary on a fifth. I've thought hard about what bothers me and have this list:
Even though I'm non-essential staff and I didn't get the call to come in, I came to work early. I can't stand another day doing nothing but puttering around the apartment. Downtown is mostly empty and there are cops and national guard on almost every corner. I did spend Friday and Saturday visiting friends upstate and Sunday I went for a 170 mile ride on the motorcycle. It's easier to push the recent events out of my head when dealing with the immediacy of running through country roads at a fast pace. Think I'll go to the Super Sunday gathering at Marcus Dairy.
I'm probably not representing this accurately, tried to post
earlier... can't sleep.
I arrived at work today a little later than usual. Heard a
crash while coming out of the subway but didn't think much
of it figuring it's always noisy in downtown. Reached my
desk, saw my red message light on, logged in and punched the
code for my voicemail. My wife had left a nervous message
asking if I was okay, that something happened at the World
Trade Center which is just a few blocks from me and the stop
she takes. I called back that I saw nothing and was okay and
tried to check cnn.com. I heard a commotion in the aisle and
found coworkers talking about the WTC. I suggested we check
the big monitor in the Risk Management area on the other
side of the office which faces the WTC. They had CNN on and
I could look at the smoking tower as the news read in the
background. I ran back to my desk and called my parents,
leaving what must have been a barely coherent "We're okay"
message since they didn't hear the news. We evacuated down
the twenty-two flights of stairs to the lobby but were sent
upstairs again. I returned to the other corner of the office
and as we watched the WTC, before I could even recognize
what happened, a plane struck the second tower off center
and fire burst out the other side. Then CNN reported that a
plane had struck the Pentagon. I ran back to my desk and
found the red light. My wife. I called her and we agreed to
meet at her office, farther away from the WTC, as soon as we
evacuated my building. For some reason, I grabbed the fire
escape kit with the water bag, dust mask and mylar blanket I
leave in my in-box where it was dropped two years ago and
grabbed another I had stashed in my overhead cabinet that I
had scavenged for the cyalume lightstick. I didn't wait and
stupidly took the elevator into the lobby. While going down,
something shook and the lights blinked but the elevator
opened into the lobby and I pushed out past the surprisingly
large number of people down there since I thought everyone
went back up. I stepped outside and it was all dust and
smoke and wind. I put on the mask and started walking as
fast as I could to Maria's office through a moonscape of
dust. I might have been running. I remember thinking that
I'm going to hyperventilate and slowed to a walk. The steel
coffee carts with the hard rolls and bagels
in the windows and young Pakistani guys inside were at the
corners but noone was inside. People grey with dust were
wandering in other directions. A Korean guy in a suit, gray
except from his eyes, was hacking and vomiting in color next
to a car while two grey people stood beside looking after
him. All the stores seemed closed or closing and when the
wind picked up, I ducked into doorways and turned away
squinting. Everything was surreal and unfamiliar. As I got
to City Hall the dust and smoke was less and I clambered
over a low wall dividing the road that I never noticed
before but must have been there for years. A woman in a
beige skirt was trying to climb over it but couldn't and I
turned to help and another guy lifted her arm and she
stumbled over it and stood in the road. For some reason it
seemed funny that she had not put away her cell phone the
whole time. I tried to make it to Broadway, but the police
were directing people and I hurried through a few streets I
rarely take feeling even more lost. I got to Worth but had
to divert back and circle a few blocks down as FBI agents
and police were shouting and opening parked trucks and
having people move away from the Federal court building. At
an intersection, I ignored a busy cop and crossed the street
and took off up Worth. The dust was thin but had reached
here too and I felt relieved to find Maria down the street
from her office. She had written a note in lipstick on the
page of a magazine and posted it on the building, in case I
got there after the police moved the evacuees away but I
didn't need it. We were okay and we told each other that we
should walk uptown away from the crisis and then figure out
what to do. We walked without much talking, relieved that
the other was okay, avoiding the emergency vehicles up to
the teens. People were everywhere and all the mass transit
was shut down. Lines were forming at banks and shops,
anywhere there was a phone or ATM. In the Village and NYU, I
got a few stares and realized that I was grey with dust. My
black shirt and shoes were ashy-looking. We found an cash
machine that wasn't empty in a bodega around the high 20's,
got cash and bought water. I had my gym clothes and offered
her my socks and sneakers but she just wanted my thin dress
socks. We sat on the slate step of a townhome and I changed
into sneakers and she put my decidedly unfashionable black
socks on and slipped back into her shoes. We then cut across
to the west side and continued up to the 50's. Like a cruel
joke, it was a perfect day- sunny, a breeze, gently warm. At
the West Side Highway, we started thumbing for a ride. Maria
was getting tired and I itched everywhere the dust had
settled on skin. A livery pulled over and let us in. The
driver, a very small boned, very dark skinned man in his
forties with an accent I couldn't recognize, maybe
Ethiopian, said he lived around the GW Bridge and was going
that way. We asked how much but he waved us off. Traffic
snarled and he got onto Broadway around 125th. While he
wiggled the car through the streets we tried to use the cell
phone and managed to get our parents and tell them we were
enroute. He drove until reaching a police line at the Bus
Terminal. We asked how much he wanted and he said he didn't
care. We gave him $50 and thanked him for stopping and he
drove off to get home. We walked the rest of the way,
arriving home at 1:35 and found ten messages on the machine.
We made a list and started calling. When we finished, for
some geeky reason I went on IRC and into email to let those
people know I was okay. I finally showered, but I still felt
gritty and itched on the back of my neck and inside my
people know I was okay.
I finally showered, but I still felt gritty and itched on
the back of my neck and inside my elbows. Hours later, after
watching the news, I am still in
a little shock and indescribably happy that Maria and I were
okay. We are lucky. I can't even conceive of the people,
folks I don't know who I pass every day, who were down
there. I hope they can contact their families. I hope they
are unscathed. I feel very lucky. I read in email that the a
number of people I casually know, some by name, were okay.
Later, after having a drink and eating something I called
coworkers and asked how they got home. Everyone was fine.
Their spouses were there or enroute. I can't sleep.
Decided that this coming Monday, I will go to the gym around
the block from work, show my ID badge (for the discount),
and sign up. I sit at my desk seven or eight hours a day and
a year of this is starting to show. I figure I can exercise
for thirty minutes at lunch each day without disrupting my
schedule and I might improve my health and probably improve
my disposition. At least I'll break from the office for a
little while. I'm also sleeping better since changing my
schedule, so I guess that worked.
Just for the hell of it, I threw a 3Com 3C509B- only one PCI
slot and it has an eepro in it- I had lying around into the
slimline P90 running OpenBSD I use as a firewall and
segregated the wireless rig. Reconfigured the access point
to use the BSD box as the gateway, tweaked TinyDNS and
created a new instance of DNScache to
serve the new network, and played with the rulesets. My wife
didn't notice the difference, which is proof enough. One of
these days I'm going to have to replace this AST
Bravo, with its Pentium Overdrive, 32MB of EDO, and a
1GB drive scavenged from another machine, with something
cheap, faster, and small. I've had this little desktop
powered on since at least November 1999 (oldest file in the
system). I'm open to suggestions. I might snag a sbus nic
and impress my headless SS5 into the role.
Books arrived. Remaining CDROMs didn't. Vacation didn't include planning a lot of time for reading but rather than toast at the beach I read into the Stevens book and experimented. Laptop battery lasts an uninspiring sixty-three minutes before forcing FreeBSD to sleep. I'm must try without running X but I suspect that it won't make much difference as most of my time is spent using Vim, reading manpages, and running gcc. Since it's a borrowed toy, I guess I can't kick.
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