Oh yeah, I'll never forget that day. I was in the office and we first heard it on the radio - it was afternoon here then. I tried to find out more on the internet, but all the news websites were down.
My mom flew to Australia that day - I remember her calling me from the airport in Zurich and asking me what was going on. I didn't know what to tell her first. Gladly, she didn't think about canceling her flight or panic. She was going to visit her friend, and that was it. Her connecting flight to London was diverted to Southampton, where the runway was barely long enough. British Airways paid her a taxi to Heathrow and she actually made it on her flight! That only because she'd changed her reservation to an earlier connecting flight only a few days before as she'd noticed that the flight she had first booked was late every day.
My dad was in Mexico City on business trip - he'd flown there on American Airlines, and I was madly trying to contact him there to tell him to fly home on another airline. I called his office here in Zurich to find out the number of the office in Mexico (at the time, his swiss mobile phone didn't work down there). They had no time for me at his office here and I thought that they were just horrible - what I didn't know that some of my dad's colleagues, one of which I knew too, were in NY, and had been staying at the hotel next to the WTC... of course that was much more to worry about. Gladly though, those guys had already left the hotel when it happened - and I got hold of my dad the next day, and he flew home on Lufthansa - though there was the question first if the company was going to pay for that or not - which I couldn't understand at all (they did pay in the end). The people who'd been in NY came home on the company CEO's private plane after all.
I can't remember how I got through the rest of the day til I got to go home. The train ride took almost an hour, and I think I was crying all the way. I just wanted to go home to at least send dad an e-mail - and then the train got stuck for about half an hour, just before a station, and there was no explanation or anything, the train just stood there. I thought I was gonna go crazy...
The one thing that picked me up though was grandpa, who called and left me first a long message on my mobile's message box - I hadn't even know that he had my mobile number. It was just great to hear him and then talk to him - he's always been a very practical and level-minded person. Just sort of what I needed to get me to calm down. He's not one to call a lot, but he called me a few times as long as I was "home alone". Grandpa knows best ;) .
What I couldn't help thinking about, when it had become clear what had happened, was the novel "The Sum of All Fears" (not the movie - they changed the plot for that) by Tom Clancy - and the end of "Debt of Honour", also by him. About 10 years earlier, he had already thought up scenarios that went into the same direction... chilling!
I worked in a travelagency then and had just two days before informed my boss that I was looking for a new job - I'd been there three years, and it was my first job after being a trainee. Well, of course there were suddenly almost no job openings anymore.
I remember we'd had a lot of bookings for the US that September, and a lot of people couldn't travel, because all flights had been suspended. Well, a lot of them didn't want to go anymore at all. There were even those who didn't want to go to Greece anymore... I had a couple who'd booked their honeymoon in California, and I think they were on one of the first flights from Zurich to the US once the flights had been taken up again. They were eager to go all the same and sent us even a postcard, telling us how much they were enjoying their trip.
Swissair went bankrupt in October and the Swiss travel industry went totally down the drain. So - job situation even worse. I stayed on in my job until my boss couldn't keep me any longer. I found a new job pretty much at the last minute the next February - with a specialist touroperater for the Middle East! And lost it again the year after because of the war in Iraq... and had to lose yet another job to get in with the company that I didn't get in with after 9/11. And I'm still there!
Karin
