We Will Never Forget

September 11th - No one can say today's date and have it be just another day. I still can't believe that it's been 5 years since that horrible tragedy. I'm sure everyone remembers where they were that day. Here's my story.

I had arrived at work at my typical time (7:45 - now I'm lucky to get to work by 8:30). I had only been with Mercer for about 7 months, and had recently taken over management of the library. I had a meeting at 8:30 that morning with a company that was trying to get our business to take over the leases of our printers/copiers. We used the copier a lot in the library, so I was asked to sit in on the meeting. It got over around 9:00.

I got back down on my floor, and went through different doors than I normally go through. I went over to my friend, Gerri's cube to talk to her. As we were talking, her boyfriend called and said that a plane had run into the World Trade Center tower. She and I couldn't believe it (in fact, I remember us rolling our eyes thinking that he was mistaken). We tried to get on cnn.com - couldn't get on - tried msnbc.com - tried foxnews.com - tried everything we could think of. None of the web sites were working.

About this same time, we noticed something. Our office building is right in the flight path for the Louisville airport. We noticed that there were a lot of planes landing - more than what was normal for that amount of time.

I walked back around the floor to head back to my cube. At that point I saw a huge group of people huddled around a co-worker's desk. They had a little tv on and were watching the news coverage.

It was about that time, that we all realized that our company, Mercer HR Consulting had their corporate offices in WTC #2. We also realized that our parent company MMC had their offices in WTC #1.

What a surreal day. We had many colleagues that were traveling on business. We soon got word that they were all safe. We then got word (over the next few days) that all of our Mercer colleagues were able to get out of building #2 before it fell. Unfortunately, our MMC colleagues weren't as lucky. MMC lost the second largest group of employees.

We will never be the same - and we will never forget.

(I have grown to love quilts over the past couple of years. Here's a quilt that I found that won some national awards. It's one of my favorites)