9/11: 25 Years Later

Twenty-five years from a particular event is a long time, at least within the scope of the average human lifespan. Twenty-five years ago, one year felt like an eternity.

The past handful of weeks leading to the 25^th anniversary of 9/11 have had me thinking about the personal impact of the event. The socioeconomic, political, and other details can be talked about until one’s blue in the face; I wanted to concentrate on how it changed how I viewed the world as I prepared to exit my teenage years, working in IT, and doing a lot more - faster - than I had ever expected.

After twenty-five years of spending the day mourning, I’m done. I’ll never forget about the thousands that lost their lives all those years ago today; that’s Impossible. I am, however, going to use it to close a chapter I should have closed years ago.

1999

I began attending Pace University in the fall of 1999. It was a year of record registrations and providing enough housing for students was a challenge. It wasn’t even something I was expecting to do; I spent the previous year and a half regaining my health and having in-home teachers keep me on track with my high school classmates.

My dorm wasn’t what I had imagined it would be; it was a one-bedroom apartment at Post Towers. The building was at 75 West St., a few blocks north of the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel and a couple of blocks south of the World Trade Center. My two roommates and I were originally assigned to an apartment on the 3rd floor, but when we walked in and, well, the floor was missing, we were moved to a temporary apartment on the 5th floor. That apartment was my first taste of being away from home, and I loved it. We were downtown, there was always activity in the neighborhood, a Gristedes’ Market on the other side of West St. in Battery Park City had the best caramel ice cream, and the Amish Market just around the corner had pretty much everything else.

The one downside? Dial-up Internet since we weren’t in actual dorms that were on the network. My NEC Versa was ready to get its FTP on, but that had to wait for a while.

Heading to class in the morning usually involved throwing on my Panasonic “Brain Shaker” headphones, grabbing a CD (probably either Orange 9mm’s Pretend I’m Human or 311’s Soundsystem at the time - a “prerelease” version floating around campus) and cutting through WTC to save a few minutes.

If I had time and a couple of extra dollars in my pocket, I might have grabbed a donut from the Krispy Kreme on the first floor of WTC 5. A conveyor belt of fresh donuts being glazed ran along the shop’s windows that pulled you in like a tractor beam. Donut in hand, I’d head over to Park Row, passing J&R to window-shop before arriving at Pace’s campus.

I began working at NFTE in February 2000, and during the spring of 2001, I helped distribute computers to Automotive High School in Brooklyn. The donation came from Euro Brokers, via the National Cristina Foundation, and was a great way to get working technology in front of students that would benefit from it.

I got to spend time assisting in some technology classes, and was even invited to be a part of their technology curriculum planning board. It’s wild to look back at myself, only 19 years old, helping shape the curriculum being placed in front of people just a few years younger than I was.

That opportunity carried a lot of responsibility with it, and getting the machines into the hands of students meant a lot. They were old Digital 486 desktops - very outdated even then - but perfect for taking apart, rebuilding, and capturing the potential that’s unleashed when you really understand how they work.

A few of the desktops remained at NFTE and were placed in the alumni BizCenter for the same purpose, giving a bunch of old Compaq desktops a break from students that liked to tinker. One became network storage for MP3s and tucked away under my desk.

The organization that provided the computers, Euro Brokers, was a major international brokerage firm that lost 61 employees on September 11th, 2001. Their offices were on the 84th floor of the World Trade Center’s south tower.

Brian Clark was an executive vice president at Euro Brokers and is known for being one of only 18 people to escape from or above the impact zone of the south tower.

I wanted to give the students some time to work on the machines, and then take a group photo of them as part of a thank-you letter to Euro Brokers. The opportunity to deliver it never came.

September 10th, 2001

It was a Monday and it was humid. I remember not wanting to eat at Jeremy’s Ale House, a regular lunch spot with NFTE’s CFO because the plastic seats would be sticky and we’d wind up smelling like beer. Just a few weeks before, a friend from high school visited the office, and we sat in the courtyard at Jeremy’s with our 32oz. Coors Light “Eye Openers.” Yeah, a fake ID and $2.75 got you a lot around the South Street Seaport before gentrification. It’s also my last memory of the place that isn’t tainted by what happened on 9/11.

The 10th was much like any other day. It was spent supporting users, building new infrastructure, and laughing at the new CIO’s bad jokes while he attempted to bond. I had been listening to Poison The Well’s The Opposite of December album a lot and the CIO came in wearing a Poison (as in the hair metal band) tee shirt that day.

He really tried hard to create connections between us; it’s a shame he never put that much energy into his work.

Earlier that summer, we rebuilt a portion of the office - clearing out old furniture, dropping new network cabling, and it was my job to get the newly installed cubicles wired and ready for use. I spent my evenings, in a silent office, concentrating on wiring work. Once all the work was complete, I ended moving from my workspace into a corner cubicle.

I remember grabbing dinner at the Water St. Cafe and working until knowing I’d make the last train back to Long Island before service paused for a few hours - and there’s nothing worse than sitting in a waiting room in Penn Station, next to a construction worker who can’t stop raving about the strawberry ice cream he’s enjoying all over the place. Realizing the time, I packed my bag and took a quick walk to the World Trade Center. While the Wall St. 2/3 station was just a couple of blocks from my office, those trains crawled at night. Walking to WTC and hopping on the E was much faster - and the walk was a nice bit of fresh air.

There was a homeless man who used to hold the doors open at the entrance going down to WTC’s lower level facing Liberty Street, and I gave him one of the wraps I got at dinner. He was a good guy; one morning I stumbled out of the doors with entirely too much in my hands. He helped me up, made sure I had all of my things while other commuters walked past, and that’s something I’ll never forget.

One other thing I’ll never forget is having a weird craving for a smoothie. I grabbed one from a smoothie place just across from the entrance to the E train and headed home. I managed to get on the last train, hit my futon around 4 AM, and decided I’d be taking a “comp day.”

September 11th, 2001

A lot of stories about 9/11 begin with the weather. I don’t remember it at all.

I remember waking up around 9 AM and being really sore; what I thought was a pretty sweet futon turned out to be a mistake. Sitting up, I stretched until my spine popped and turned my TV on. Instead of Jerry Springer, or whatever would normally be on at the time on WPIX-11, I saw a news anchor and an exploding building instead.

It took a moment for me to realize what I was watching; I remember murmuring “Die Hard?” to myself and then my heart sinking the moment I realized I was looking at the World Trade Center, the building I bought a smoothie in just a handful of hours earlier.

Cellular service was overloaded. This was the first time I heard the “all circuits are busy” recording. I had an Uncle that worked for AIG in a building between my office and WTC, friends at various businesses in the area, classmates from Pace University, and an entire organization of people I couldn’t get in touch with.

In the meantime, NFTE had a staff retreat going on, so a bunch of employees from the regional offices were in NY. Everyone that was there evacuated the building safely and found ways to get home.

In hindsight, my choice to work late the night before and then take a comp day may be why I’m still here. While there are a ton of things that could have taken place, I would have likely taken a train later than my usual 6:38 AM to Penn. If I decided to go in on September 11th, there’s a likelihood that I would have been at Ground Zero when the first plane struck. On days when I skipped the 6:38, I’d typically take the 7:21. It arrives at Penn Station a bit before 8:30 - tack on time to walk to the E train and the ride downtown, and things could have been completely different for me.

I managed to get in touch with a couple of friends, and once I did, I knew that there was nothing else to do but hop in my Jeep and get myself to Brooklyn. I folded the back seats down, lined the bed with pillows, blankets, towels, and whatever bottled water and snacks I could grab.

Once on the road, I hit play on the stereo and Poison The Well began playing. Their music became my soundtrack for 9/11.

I somehow managed to find my friends by the base of the Brooklyn Bridge and got them - along with a handful of others - loaded in and headed back east. Everyone got home, and then I got home, looked at my shitty futon, and collapsed onto it.

I have one memory of evacuation that NFTE’s CFO shared with me, and despite the reasons for it happening, still can’t help laugh about it 25 years later.

Steve Mariotti, the Founder and then-President of the organization, was a very diplomatic person. Despite the wooden “Mariotti” baseball bat he kept in the office, with a few broken letters, he was a kind, gentle person who was always up for a conversation - even as the world crumbled around him.

Steve and the CFO, Tom, had to help the COO, Dave, get to Grand Central or find another way to get out of Manhattan and back to Connecticut. He had one of those huge compression boots on one of his legs as he recovered from injury, and they “attached” him to a hand truck to get him around.

While wheeling Dave uptown and away from Ground Zero, an unhinged man began blaming the three of them for what happened. They were all businessmen in fancy suits walking away from Wall St., so they were clearly the cause. As the story goes, instead of pushing him away or finding another way to continue the trip uptown without him, Steve took the time to listen to his argument - and responded. Steve was good at listening, so I have no doubt that his response took a lot of the man’s points into account - and based on the response Steve, covered in ash and debris, got - I’d say he did.

All the man could do was look at him from head to toe and say,

“Brother, you need a new suit.”

That was Steve.

Mike Caslin, the then-CEO of NFTE went to Ground Zero on 9/11 and helped at a temporary morgue. He published a book encompassing his experience - Fallen Innocence, Towering Love: Thoughts For Healing from Ground Zero. Mike’s a great guy, but I could never bring myself to reading it.

September 12th, 2001

The next morning was more surreal than when I turned my television on the previous morning. Buildings were gone, people were gone, and the channels still broadcasting - mostly via cable - tried to cover the news the best they could.

A WABC-NY employee, Don DiFranco was killed on the 110th floor of the World Trade Center’s north tower, along with other broadcast engineers. He was working his overnight shift at the station’s transmitter site, making a final call to master control warning of disrupted service after the tower was hit. All transmissions ceased by 10:28 AM when the tower collapsed.

Watching news teams struggle, not just because of what happened, but because of the team, friends, and family members they lost, made figuring out how to enable communications between my team members the only thing on my mind.

We were pre-Exchange during 9/11, running a basic Slackware server with SMTP and POP3 services. Once power and Internet were restored, the mail server came online.

After connectivity to the Globix Datacenter in Chinatown was restored (I don’t think I regained physical access for a few weeks), I RDP’d into the server that hosted nfte.com and modified the homepage to focus on updates, and providing ways for students and teachers to keep as informed as possible.

Once that was done, I finally let myself sit down and get a full picture of what happened. At that point, my shitty futon felt like the most comfortable thing in the world.

September 18th, 2001

We were cleared to enter 120 Wall St. a week after 9/11. At the time, that felt like an eternity. I hopped on my usual 6:38 AM train to Manhattan, and it was a ghost town. Spend enough time commuting and you begin to recognize faces and patterns - and their absence.

There was a man in his 30s who’d get on the train, one stop before it went express to Penn, and would never sit. Instead, he’d stand in the train car’s vestibule looking like a time capsule of the mid 1980s. He wore pleated khaki pants, windbreakers, had the same haircut Michael J. Fox’s character in Family Ties had, and always sported a yellow Sony Sports Walkman on his belt. I never saw him again. The same can be said for many.

When a train from Long Island is headed to Penn Station, it travels through a tunnel under the east river, and you can feel the pressure change inside the train as it enters the tunnel. I remember being hit with a wave of anxiety when my ears popped; the thought of being under a river being too much to handle with everything else going on. Of course, the tunnels are in the ground, under the river - a random fact I probably picked up by watching Discovery Channel over the years, and I was fine.

Penn Station, however, was a mess; members of NYPD and the National Guard were helping direct people to keep traffic flowing and provide a sense of safety. Looking back, the distinctive profile of the H&K MP5 became a strangely comfortable thing to see in the hands of local authorities and military members as the years went on.

The E station where I began my trip home on the 10th was closed down due to damage, and trains were terminating at Chambers Street. I got a 2/3 train down to Fulton Street instead.

Once at street level, I walked from Fulton toward Gold St., and then John St. walking down to Water Street, finally entering 120 Wall St. through the rear entrance at the alley between it and the Goldman Sachs building next door.

“Matt, only the front entrance for now - we gotta keep this locked down. Deliveries only.”

My memory of that walk is still vivid in my mind because of the places I passed along the way. I remember passing Bennie’s Thai Cafe, the first place I ever had Thai food. Pearl Diner, my favorite diner in the area that kept me full of turkey burgers during the years I skipped red meat. A Chinese restaurant across the street my Uncle Rick would take me to when he had enough time to get away from his desk at AIG.

That first walk back to NFTE will stick with me forever - the smell of decay, a thick layer of ash caked onto everything, and keeping my head down as I walked, controlling my breathing for the simple sake of not vomiting.

I got in an elevator, walked into the computer room, made sure everything was running - and then I vomited.

More team members arrived and began to figure out what was next. How do we communicate with the schools where our programs are taking place? How do we get in touch with funders - and do they even still exist? These are questions that would be answered over the coming weeks, and at the moment, we just wanted the office itself to feel “normal” so we could get to everything else.

At some point, I headed into Steve’s office to make sure his setup was in good shape. Despite being a non-profit organization, I remember figuring out a way to get a sweet Alienware setup for his desk. Steve loved playing Quake and listening to Fine Young Cannibals when nobody else was in the office, and I wanted to make sure he had the best equipment possible because seeing him have some fun, considering how hard he worked, was important.

Once I knew Steve was up and running, I decided to get some air on a balcony accessible by a door in his office. I stepped outside, took a deep breath and choked on the stench - even 29 floors up - and then looked down at my feet.

All I saw was a human scalp and some burned stock certificates. I walked back into the office, vomited a second time, and called building management. They bagged everything up and got back to work - which seemed to be a lot of the same for them that day.

We didn’t even make it to lunchtime without having to evacuate the building. The emergency broadcast system came online, strobe lights began flashing, and a message to calmly evacuate the building via the stairwells was communicated to all tenants. By the time we made it to the lobby, news of a potential bomb threat was being shared among people - and confirmed by management.

Everyone decided to not spend time asking questions and just head home. The CFO, also a Long Islander, and I walked up to Penn Station and got an unexpected opportunity to see the city from a different point of view. The financial district was a wasteland, but above 14th street or so was different; it was a city in recovery. People were out shopping, delis were busy making sandwiches, and everything had a sense of life that was missing from downtown. We stopped to grab a couple bottles of water somewhere in the 20s and that was one of the best bottles of water, ever.

The next day, we learned the suspected bomb was a case of soap.

The Aftermath

NFTE, like many organizations, shrunk for a bit. We lost staff due to a lack of funding, while others left for new opportunities or to just get away from the memories. It took some time, but we bounced back and so did others.

I slowly began to recognize faces during my morning commute to Manhattan. One morning, a woman sat next to me, put her hand on my knee to get my attention, and simply said it was nice to see me. I looked up and instantly began babbling. She was a regular commuter who’d catch my eye every time she stepped onto the train. She looked a lot like Kate Hudson, and wore a trench coat and large dark glasses - very Jackie O-inspired. This must have been in early 2002 because we walked to the downtown E train together - which had been out of operation since the towers fell.

Once the E train’s service was restored, I began to get back to a semi-normal commute, standing at the middle of the 34th St. platform after getting the LIRR to Penn Station. One morning, a woman who was a regular at the station walked up to me and gave me a hug. We had never spoken before; we were just people that recognized each other and gave a typical “hey” nod while on the platform.

Around the same time, I remember getting on a C train and seeing another familiar face. Not a person I knew, just another person on the train who was a regular. I said hello and that I was happy to see her, and she began to cry. We sat together whenever I got a C train downtown (the next train if I didn’t make the usual E) from that day until she retired in 2005.

My work went from rebuilding infrastructure to building out new infrastructure designed to maintain operations if a similar attack happened in the future. This is when “not if, but when” became embedded in how I think. I worked with a consultant and built a warm disaster recovery cabinet at Globix’s Santa Clara datacenter.

We set up a point-to-point VPN connection using 3COM Superstack 3 firewalls and had several servers in place: a Domain Controller, a server dedicated to file storage that could also run critical applications, and an Exchange 2000 server that was mirrored with the new one in my office using software from Neverfail.

We shipped the hardware to Globix and by the time the consultant and I landed in San Jose, everything was sitting in the cabinet ready for us to plug and power. Leaving the datacenter wasn’t happening until everything was online, and I could confirm that Active Directory, Exchange, and Windows DFS were functioning as expected.

While we didn’t have much time outside the datacenter during the trip, I did get a chance to visit a Fry’s Electronics for the first time. I bought a SoundBlaster 64 that was on sale, and then we found the closest place with pizza and beer. While the food was good, it wasn’t the pizza and beer that we wanted - and led to a countdown until we were back in NY and could go to the first diner we both agreed upon: the Golden Reef diner in Rockville Centre.

Less than a year or so later, the Northeast Blackout of 2003 happened. We lost power at NFTE’s HQ - right as I was standing at a urinal in the Men’s room - and I spent the night at a coworker’s apartment, along with a bunch of others. Once power was restored the next morning, I headed into the office. A review of the logs proved the Exchange server in the DR cabinet kicked in, public DNS records were modified, and mail continued to flow.

Watching properly implemented technology do its job when it was needed most was a good feeling; good enough to get me back out on the balcony and feeling in control again - and maybe a bit more grown up.

At some point between 2003 and 2004, I was at a bar in the East Village. I got up from my stool to use the Men’s room. Poison The Well’s Rings From Corona was playing through the speakers.

I stood at a urinal while a man hassled a guy he suspected was of Middle-Eastern descent. I zipped up, grabbed the man by his collar, and slammed him against a stall divider so hard that it separated from the wall.

“I’d shake your hand, but you never washed it. Thank you.”

I laughed, washed my hands, grabbed my messenger bag, and let the bartender know someone fucked up their bathroom before heading out - and then walked to a McDonald’s in the area where you could order an off-menu veggie burger.

I saw Poison The Well play at The Knitting Factory in February 2004. It was a great show - The Bled, Murder by Death, and The Kinison opened for them - and a few friends from Pace University came along. Instead of jumping into the pit, I sat with them simply enjoying the ability to still be around each other.

There were plenty of Poison The Well shows in the following years, and you’d usually find me at them - or at a 7-11 getting a Slurpee and Tylenol after.

September 11th, 2026

It’s been 25 years since 9/11. I stopped commuting to Manhattan after my time at Valiant Technology completed at the end of 2022, choosing to mostly work with IT management vendors as a contractor which, looking back, makes a lot of sense. While it was never the plan, my focus has largely been on helping organizations maintain operations - both daily and in disaster scenarios like Hurricane Sandy and the COVID pandemic.

Poison The Well released their latest album, Peace In Place, back in March. I waited for the full album to be released, avoiding singles until it came out, and then the headphones went on. It’s a great album, and I fell apart by “Everything Hurts.” That’s the moment I realized that their music accompanied me over the years.

I put my hand up to my face and realized I was bleeding; I bit clear through my lip without realizing it. The flood of memories and catharsis overrode any sense of pain I would have been experiencing as I realized I’m still here, and so are they. There are posters from their Versions album and a 2004 concert when they opened for Thursday on the wall behind me as I write this. I think it’s a good example of how some things remain constant, maybe because we need them to, as the entire world changes around us.

When I’m on a live stream or recording a video in my workspace, you only really see one corner of the room. This isn’t for the sake of privacy or anything; I just like to focus on where the work gets done. If I were to change the angle of the Canon I point at my desk while recording, you’d see a huge photograph of the Twin Towers by Ralf Uicker.

I got it from IKEA along with a desk, some cinnamon rolls, and other random items in 2003. There’s nothing particularly special about it - it’s just a photo of a time before 9/11, and given that I was only 19 when it all happened, a photo of my childhood.