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velvetvandal, love your fiction suit.
But back on topic:
I guess I'm slightly concerned about living in a major U.S. city, and I'm slightly concerned about working in Chicago's third tallest building, and I'm slightly concerned about the fact that I go to our mailroom several times a week.
But really, I just refuse to be scared. I had a few days shortly after 911 that I WAS pretty scared and had trouble sleeping (and I generally sleep like the dead so I knew something was up), but then I decided that being scared wasn't going to get me anywhere, and it certainly wasn't going to prevent anything "bad" from happening to me.
I'll tell what HAS scared me, though. I have this really boring, Kafka-esque job at the moment which I actually quite like because the company is mind-blowingly corporate they're almost a cariacture and I find that fascinating. My coworkers all seem to dislike their jobs, but they love the company (which is really very good to their employees) and they make scads of money so they all seem to have accepted their fate, and happily do their work. I've been here for nearly a month, and although I understand how to do my job I don't really understand the point of it, and for the life of me I can't figure out what this company actually DOES.
They lost a ton of people in the WTC attacks. One day a few weeks ago, I had to match all of these names, home addresses, and home phone numbers with their cell phones. It was an excel spreadsheet, and at the end of the spreadsheet their was a column that was either blank, or it said, "ID: Police," "Unknown" or "Presumed Deceased."
I thought only the "deceased" people were actually dead, but when I finished the list I realized that every person on that list was dead. And all of their pictures were on the company web site. Young people, old people, high rollers, janitors, black, white, men, women... and the fact that I had their home addresses and phone numbers made them that much more real to me. For a while I just stared at the names on the list. I was glad I hadn't realized they were ALL dead when I started working on it.
That friends, that was scary.
But don't worry about me. When this whole thing happened, I really really wanted to do some creepy morbid job that needed to be done due to the WTC attack because I knew I could handle it. And I think that was it. |
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