I was pulling into the parking lot at Intergraph when the DJ said a plane had struck the WTC. Because our business was 911 systems and a pilot had explained the scenario to me years earlier while we were flying into Reagan, I suspected this was the one predicted.
I also knew our business was suddenly solid gold.
It was a terrible feeling so instead of watching the TV with the others, I went to my desk to remove from our web pages the name of a colleague who had died from heart attack a month earlier. I walked down the hall in time to see the second tower collapse. A lady in the room said, "What happened to the firemen that ran in there?" and I said, "They're dead. You just watched them die."
It was macabre.
The irony is some of us who are analysts began the research into how our systems could be used to protect us. As a result, Intergraph Public Safety would become a sub to Lockheed for New York/New Jersey MTA and today, that is newsworthy on ABC.
You can know what will happen, what to do, try to do it and fail. The usual meme is you learn from your mistakes. That isn't always true for reasons I won't go into here and now because even if you believe me, it won't make a damm bit of difference.
