9/11 - The Little Things...

 It wasn't on 9/11, but a few weeks later I realized it.

I do not remember the specific class, I remember the building and the classroom.  St John's University, Engle Hall, first floor.  It was a morning Management class.  And it was all in the details, somehow.  The prof took roll very occasionally.  I thought it was funny, yet odd.  With a last name starting with D, I may not be first, but I'm pretty early in and alphabetized list.  And in this class I was fifth.  One student's last name started with A, one with B, one with C...  and two of us with D.  And I was the second one.  I don't know why it stuck in my head, but I do remember #2.  Tom Burnett.

 Yes, the one on flight 93.  I don't know that I would have had the courage to do what he did, but I am glad that I live in a world where people like him did have that courage.  I do wish it had not been lost in such a horrible way, but I do know that their efforts likely kept Flight 93 from killing more people.

I also remember I had recently started following Moby, the musician, through his "blog".  His birthday was September 11th and he lived in New York City.  His description of life after the attack was haunting.  I still do not recall hearing much of his music, but I haven't been out of my rut.

My wife mentioned the color of the sky that day.  On Sunday, two days before, as a family we had toured downtown St. Paul, looking at the collection of Snoopy figures that different artists had decorated to create a tourist draw.  I do feel a rather personal connection to the Peanuts characters, thanks to my uncle Roman Baltes.  He was quite the character himself, and my father had many stories of Uncle Romey's antics.  There was the time, in the late 1950s, shortly after the launch of Sputnik, where he was apparently roaming (sorry) the aisles of a local surplus shop, Axman Surplus, where he picked up a basketball-sized mirrored ball, a couple surplus extendable metal antennae.  

 With those, some glue, a shovel, and some smoke bombs and fireworks, he caused a ruckus.  A short trench to the neighbor's garden, his mirrored ball with the antennae attached to look like Sputnik, he called the neighbor and asked if they had seen the flash or heard the boom of the satellite crashing...  in their yard.

Aside from practical jokes, his day job was a cartoonist.  He had worked for years for, among others, the St. Paul Press Dispatch, which later became the Pioneer Press.  He had so much work that at times he hired other talented folks to help do things like write the speech balloons.  One of the young fellows he hired for that gentleman's first commercial art job was Charles Schulz.  So it wasn't much of a reach for St. Paul to select Snoopy as a tourist draw.  F. Scott Fitzgerald' characters are a little less attractive for little kids.

One of our stops that Sunday was outside the St. Paul World Trade Center, just about  block from the building where my wife worked for 24+ years.  When we heard that some of the older kids in the schools my children attended then had been allowed to watch the news on TV, my wife wanted to pick the kids up from school to make sure they did not worry.  My daughter was a bit too young then but my son was still in daycare.

 So when I left my office to drive to downtown St. Paul to get my wife, I had to go past the MSP airport.  My office was about 3 miles from it, so we usually had plenty of airplane noise.  It had almost gone silent, but for the occasional roar as one or more of the local F-16 fighters, that had been launched to fly cover and protect us.       

 And while it sounds terrible, what feels almost worse is how much I did enjoy fixing the aftereffects of the NIMDA virus.  That hit on September 12.  It affected Microsoft's SQL Server.  The "admin" account was the user SA, and as I recall, Microsoft's instruction was to use the password "admin" to allow SQL Server installations to communicate and replicate.  And some fuckwit decided to create a virus that replicated through the like quite literally crap through a goose.  I was the IT guy and fallback "level 5 Help Desk" for a software company that had a few hundred SQL Server implementations.  Level 5 meant after our general Help Desk and product-specific Help Desk couldn't fix it, level 3 was our implementation project managers who had worked directly with our customers took a crack at it.

If they couldn't fix it, it got passed to our development team.  Programmers, SQL DBAs, and other certified Microsoft Specialists got the job.  When they threw their hands up and gave up, I was the last person in line and had to solve it.  Which worked out because I had to disinfect our servers, in production, support, and development, before we could do anything else.  In the end I pulled together what I knew, what I had figured out, and a few hunches, I learned to disconnect the computer from the networks, boot from a clean Disk/CD, do a clean install, and then patch a couple holes and change the damned SA password.

Sounds easy now, took me about twelve hours to figure it out and get it done.  Then I was able to automate the fix and get that sent out to our clients.  Made me feel pretty good right up to the day that company laid me off a few months later.  

I do suppose in years to come many of us are going to have a great deal in common with everyone who remembers December 7th, 1941.  The world changed on both of those days.  I can hope that we don't experience another day like it, but the current administration seems far more focused on theft, grift, cheating, and breaking our existing alliances with our friends around the world.