[Studio25]

On 11/9/2001 I was working at an American company in Preston. It was a good contract: The bloke (from Seattle) who hired me used to get all his work done on Monday and spent the rest of the week trading stocks. He trusted me to do my stuff unsupervised as the job he'd hired me to do, the one his IT department said couldn't be done on a realistic budget, I did on my first morning about three weeks earlier. To be honest, I think he was "inventing" work just so I could stay.

Anyway, on that Tuesday, he was wandering round the office at about 2:20 with his hands in his pockets. He tended not to stand over my shoulder, but that afternoon he did - very annoying (I used to have a boss who did it all the time). Something was on his mind.

"Something bad has happened"
"What"
"Don't know. I was connected to my broker and it just stopped working. That never happens. Never."

I just assumed he was fretting about a computer that had crashed somewhere, but he was insistent that it was major because CNN and all the other stuff he wasted his time with was down, too. I didn't think anything of it so I went onto the internet (dialup!) and saw on the Land Rover list I use that there had been a post ten minutes earlier asking if anyone had heard about the plane that had hit the WTC. Then, while the boss & I were watching, an email came in with just the text "Two planes!"

He said "That would do it"

All the news sites I knew of were down. The only one that seemed to work was Ananova, which I hadn't heard of before then. The first video was available through some Greek news website.

The company's internet connection wasn't working for any sites. The three people who worked at out location ended up huddled around my crappy little laptop, looking at foreign language news sites, connected to Freeserve on 56K dialup, just because it was the only way we were getting any info.

And despite remembering all those details, it still didn't make me feel physically ill, as Beslan did.