Remembering 9-11, my own personal story

I'll never foret 9-11. I worked @ washingtonpost.com. I lived less than 5 miles from the pentagon.

I had gotten back from my morning run before work. Back when I had a TV, I was in the habit of turning it on before work in the morning to watch the news while I did my "after run" stretching.

i turned it on just after the first plane had hit the one tower. i thought i was watching a clip from a new movie coming up. i hadn't yet comprehended that i was watching an actual plane getting ready to fly into the pentagon down the road

i called my boss. didn't even understand what he said... he said something in mumble speak and hung up. i knew better then to call back. i just headed to work as fast as i could...

that day of work will be etched in my brain forever. the washingtonpost.com technology team broke up into different tasks to help our website stay up during the extraordinary traffic.

my job was to monitor 5 of our web servers for potential hacks. other team members took all non-essential high-bandwidth hogging programs off of the front page and onto a 2nd front page in order to make our front page highly available.

we knew everyone would be on our site all day checking on loved ones and we knew it needed to stay up. we were the only major news website who stayed up with 98% availability that day!!! we were proud of that!

all of our lives were changed forever that day. not for the least of reasons that if i had stayed on my old career path from 2 years prior that i might have been with one of my old co-workers who died in the pentagon.

let us never forget all of those extraordinary human beings that lost their lives trying to save others. let us never forget.

remembering 9-11....