[Benzgirl]

I was at a new job that I had only been at for 2 1/2 months. About 15 minutes after the first plane hit, one of the women who worked for me (and a big gossip) said she had just received a call from her daughter about it. I told her to go back to work. Shortly therafter, nobody could access the internet. It was at a crawl. That is when everyone's phones started to ring.

All news sites were jammed. You could not get into CNN, so we all ran over to the company gym (6 TVs) to see what was going on.

Early that afternoon, the company offered early release to everyone. I had intended on working that afternoon, but my employees all left.

During this time, I was in corporate housing one block from work, in downtown Cleveland. One of my friends started to work there about 2 weeks earlier and was also in corporate housing. We got a call from a co-worker to meet us at a bar a few blocks from the bank.

There was no one in site, no cars on the street and the police bagged all of the parking meters. When we got to the bar, all that we saw was a "Closed" sign. Talk about the Twilight Zone.

Neither of us wanted to go back to our apartments, but there were no restaurants or bars open. We ended up at the bar in the Embassy Suites where all of the guests were glued to the TV. Cell phone reception was minimal. When someone could get through, you were telling the person on the other line to call someone for somebody you didn't know.

My mom kept telling me to drive home. Why? I would be glued to the TV there too. She thought that the terrorists would fly a plane into our building until I told her that they would need to swerve passed quite a few taller buildings before finally hitting our building. Trust me, they would say that our 9-story building just wasn't worth all of the work.



Tonight, I talked to my friend that I was with that night. She just moved to North Carolina, and we still talk about it every anniversary since.