In an New York Minute

Where were you on September 11?

There are events that take place in your life that imprint themselves indelibly in your brain and heart. You can remember exactly where you were at the time. September 11 has to be one of those for many of us. Where were you? I’d love you to comment on your experience of that event at the bottom of this post.

For me, it was a normal morning, on September 12, because we are ahead of the rest of the world in time zones. I was up at 6 am, as usual, getting ready to head into my office at Viaduct Harbour in Auckland, overlooking the Americas Cup Village, where I was Wireless Computing Director for Rocom Wireless, having sold my company Mission Control Ltd, to them and joined them on an exciting venture as a newly listed public company.

If you have followed my previous posts, you will know that I need to know what is going on in the world. I have a thing with transistor radios. Well, I did back then because the smartest phones weren’t very smart in 2022 terms. Our top Smartphone was the Kyocera Palm phone, which was a cool phone. I still own one. The iPod wouldn’t be released for another month and iPhones were still 6 years away.

The point is that while I could read the news on my phone, I couldn’t listen to it. Normally I would put a transistor radio on the window sill in our bathroom and listen to the morning news while having a wet shave.

For some reason on the morning of September 12, I had forgotten to turn on my radio until I was halfway through shaving my face. This wasn’t a long process, as you can see from the photo above as I was wearing a beard.

Anyway, I had lathered my face with shaving foam and then remembered to turn on the radio. I couldn’t believe what I heard!

Someone had flown a plane American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower of the World Trade Centre. My heart skipped a beat and my face felt cold and clammy. It wasn’t the shaving foam. Then they said another plane had flown into and crashed into the South Tower which had collapsed, and then half an hour later the North Tower collapsed.

I ran into the lounge and turned on our big 50 inch Toshiba TV (remember this was 2001) which my boss and friend, Nick Van Dijk had given me back in my Monaco days. There was the story, with images that were burned into my mind like the flames that were erupting, as the plane seemed to fly in one side of the building and out the other.

I ran into the bedroom and woke my wife, and then my two daughters, telling them they needed to come into the lounge and see this. I remember my older daughter Gemma saying, “This better not be a joke, Dad!” not being impressed at being woken up at such an ungodly hour. “Hurry up I replied, this is serious.”

We all stood around the lounge watching the TV, aghast, shocked, me with shaving foam slowly dissolving, unnoticed on my face.

Like so many people, I had visited the World Trade Centre, the size of which couldn’t even fit into my throwaway panorama camera, and my first thought, which I’m sure tens of thousands of people had, was, “That could have been me.”

I was late for work that day, and as were many people, we spent a lot of the day talking about visits to New York, the shock and horror that something like this could happen, and the images that you have all seen, of what looked like bodies falling from the tower, a fireman covered in ash, people being interviewed about what they had seen. All in a state of shock. This short video encapsulates that day.

It is difficult to explain the shock, on the other side of the world. We all felt it that day, even people who had never been in the Twin Towers, long a landmark of American Success stories, like the Empire State Building was an integral part of New York City. We felt violated and shocked, even more so to later learn that one of the terrorists learned to fly in a flying school in New Zealand and the story goes, that he was not particularly interested in learning how to land an aircraft.

The poignancy of what happened can be heard in Don Henly’s song New York Minute. I love the song which features in my Top #500 Songs and I chose a video where you can read the heartfelt lyrics as well as listen to the amazing song, which serves as a reminder that everything can change in a heartbeat. In that minute, our lives changed. The whole world changed.

My wife and I were 17 rows from the stage at Western Springs on the 25th of November 2005 in Auckland and my eyes teared up when they performed this song. It was from the heart. It reminded me that we should treat every day as a treasure.

Tomorrow is not guaranteed.