By Scott May

Faculty Guest Writer

A few months before September 11, 2001, I was promoted to my first job that required a shirt and tie. The company provided me with a cell phone and pager, too. I thought I had found my way to a “grown-up job” without a college degree. Little did I know I wouldn’t have that job much longer, largely because of what was about to happen on the 11th.

The job was with a trucking company based out of St. Louis. The reason they gave me a phone and a pager, I quickly learned, was to keep me on a very short leash. My role was to find leasing units—trucks of various sizes and shapes—for businesses that needed them. This included times when trucks would break down in the middle of nowhere in the middle of the night. I’d be on the phone for hours trying to locate a rig for some poor driver stranded in a desolate place, just trying to get home to their family.

On the morning of the 11th, I was out in the lot counting trucks, recording their mileage, and checking for damage. I remember it was the most beautiful day. I had once heard that in the Midwest there are only three perfect days of weather a year, and that September morning happened to be one of them. When I returned to the office, a colleague, Patrick, told me a plane had hit the World Trade Center. He was trying to load news images on his computer—a slow process back then. We assumed it was a small private plane. A Cessna, or something. Of course, we were wrong.

Later, another coworker came into the office to tell us a second plane had hit the other tower. He delivered it like a punchline—suggesting pilots trusted autopilot too much to look where they were going. We took the news as a joke simply because that was how it was told to us. The truth was unimaginable. We were horribly wrong.

I remember the sensation when the reality of those planes finally hit. For anyone paying attention, it was a violent epiphany everywhere all at once—like an elevator floor dropping out from beneath the global order. Everything turned upside down. The silence felt heavy, pounding, and strange. Though the skies were bright and clear, not a single plane was in sight, something completely unheard of in downtown St. Louis.

I don’t remember much of the rest of that day, except watching coworkers stare at CNN. Not a single office phone rang. Not until I got home.

As soon as I pulled off my tie, my pager buzzed. Then my cell phone started ringing. I ignored them at first, but neither device would let me sit quietly to gather my senses. They kept going off until I finally answered. It was Patrick.

“Get on the phone to the trucking stations! Gas prices are going to soar! Every truck needs to be filled now,” he barked with classic corporate urgency.

I said something like, “There’s much more to think about right now than gas prices, Patrick.” I did my best to sound stern. I wanted him to feel bad for his thoughtlessness—for his ugly hierarchy of concern.

“Just get it done!” Patrick snapped, and hung up.

I waited several moments, turning it over in my head, before I reluctantly dialed the downtown location and reached the shop manager. “They want the tanks of every unit filled,” I told him.

I was stunned when the voice on the other end simply replied, “Makes sense,” and hung up.

That haunting quiet that had lingered all day curdled into visceral disgust. The reaction wasn’t even directed entirely at Patrick or the shop manager, but at myself, my community, and the system we were part of. After those two phone calls, I kept asking myself: How can this make sense to anyone?

I hated the job from that moment on. I never called another location to tell them to fill another tank. My company phone and pager never rang again.

The transportation industry ground to a halt after the 11th, snarled by Port Authority inspections and the sudden, chilling realization that commercial trucks could be deployed as weapons. After all, a truck had been used in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center. Anyone seeking to lease a truck was suddenly viewed with suspicion. Not two weeks later, I was laid off.

The day they let me go was almost as beautiful as the 11th. The sky was the exact same shade of blue, and the air felt just as still. But for the first time since the towers fell, my head felt clear. Joyful, even. Standing there newly unemployed, I knew there was nothing left for me to learn in that place. I hoped there was greater purpose and better sense to be found somewhere else in the world.

There was, and I did.

Scott May is an assistant professor of English at Delaware County Community College. He returned to college as a non-traditional student a few years after September 11, 2001.