Was working at National RV in Perris, California. I started work at 5:00 am every day to be able to place orders to east coast vendors and get a day's jump on them shipping. Heard the news while working. One of the managers arrived freaking out that it was a Jetblue flight, because her sister worked for them and was due for a flight out of NY that day. We spent the day with every plane talked about becoming that flight as she freaked out even more.
There were rare big screen TV's in the customer service lounge, so we put them on the news stations. Of course, when the plane hit the second tower the panic manager missed it. Our IT guy came in, heard about it and made some sort of panicked phone call. He came out of his office and said he was leaving, because we were under the flightpath for nearby March ARB. Seems he retired out of there and was aware of a number of high value operations still there the public didn't know about. He was certain that if it were an all out attack March would be a primary target.
The managers wandered in late as always and had to be brought up to date. They forced everyone who arrived to stay at work. One kept saying, "Nobody would attack the United States. We have to be here for our customers!". We literally didn't receive a single phone call all day. Normally we got around 300 an hour in our department.
It was early days for the internet, but there was a high speed connection there, so I spent my day watching things like the "SOS Temps" site and a number of Black Ops related sites vanish from the internet forever. Search engines sent me to wrong addresses, and seemed to be blocked in many places. The AF Academy had a site with text of speeches given to students available on it. There were a number of files about Bin Lauden's activities, our involvement with them and complaints we gave them too much information. By 9:00 am those files and the page for them vanished forever.
Finally, it was the first time George Soros came out from behind the curtain and started making public announcements against Bush and Republicans, and his presence on line that day was massive. Nobody else I knew had ever heard of him before that. Like he didn't know it was going to happen....
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