The cafeteria at the Oak Hill Motorola1 campus had great breakfast tacos. Bacon egg potato cheese on grilled tortilla.
That’s all I was thinking about as I made my way from the parking garage into the lobby and saw the mob of people crowded around the television. For a selfish second I could only think of bacon egg potato cheese on grilled tortilla as I made my way towards MOS-11 that morning, thirteen years ago today, when I heard a guy explain to a friend that walked in just before me:
“Another plane just flew into the other tower from behind…”
Like anybody else will tell you: the rest of the day — nay, the week — was beyond surreal. 2 One of my coworkers and I had a conversation about how our different cultures3 tend to handle such national tragedies — would we sensationalize it on the news, or try to put it out of our memory and pretend it never happened? In the aftermath of the dot-com bubble burst — and in the context of the global economy — what happened that day may have marked an inflection point towards the current chapter of my journey, which began five years later (eight years ago, today).
That was before Facebook and Twitter and smartphones.4
A couple of years ago I asked my students what they remembered about that day. 5 Most of them told me that that was the day that they got to watch TV all day, and that their parents cried a lot.
I was eight when the Challenger explosion happened, and I barely understood much about that. 6
Yesterday I told my students that I actually remember life before the internet, and they asked me what that was like. I paused before answering, and said,
“It was easier to hide from parents.”
That apparently drew some heartfelt agreement. Seems that a lot of their parents track them via their smartphones. I cannot imagine life as a teenager like that.7
Tomorrow marks the close of the first 5-day week of the school year. While it’s been an exhausting one,8 it wasn’t close to being that bad.
- later Freescale [↩]
- Newspaper front pages showed pictures of people that were caught above the floors where the plane hit choosing to escape from the tower by diving off the tower head-first — images that I will never forget [↩]
- He was Indian, I’m Korean [↩]
- Hey, iPhone 6 preorders begin tonight~ [↩]
- today’s high school seniors were 4 or 5 on nine-eleven [↩]
- I *do* remember that my school teachers were saying that one of the astronauts was a teacher — Christa McAuliffe — and that my friends laughed when some of the teachers said out loud, “that could’ve been me!” [↩]
- Uh, not that I ever did anything bad when I was a kid, of course. [↩]
- filled with grading AP Stat papers [↩]