Spectre of Death

I hate this day. I really do. 

I try to avoid all the politicized posturing and ranting of what the extremists on both sides have made this day about in this country, about the number of people whose memories of what was going on in this city nine years ago are completely warped and wrong. I really despise what's happened to us because of the cracks that have spider-webbed out as a result of that morning.

I lost friends, I lost co-workers, and I went to I can't remember how many funerals and memorials in the aftermath. And I heard enough horror stories about the rescue efforts, the body recovery, the rivers of blood in the street, the makeshift morgues at Brooks Brothers & Century 21 to last me a lifetime. 

And every year I can't help but think about how a quirk of fate saved my life on September 11th, 2001.

In November 2000 I was employed by a private investment firm and was having issues with my manager, to a point that I'd started looking around for another job. The tech boom had gone bust, though, and jobs in the IT field were suddenly hard to find. 

Still, I got a call one afternoon from a recruiter, who asked if I'd be interested in interviewing with Cantor Fitzgerald. He arranged a phone screen, which lasted twenty minutes and which I thought had gone well. 

Turned out it went very well. He calls me back and says they want to meet with you face to face, they're looking to move fast on this spot so this is probably a one-shot interview. What do you think?

Sure, I said. Only issue was this: my office was located in midtown, at Rockefeller Center. To get all the way down to the World Trade Center and back would eat into a lot of time if I went during lunch. I'd  need to make sure the interview wouldn't take very long, or else I'd have to do it after work or figure out something else.

The recruiter got back to me: Sure, no problem, they said it'd be pretty quick, you'd be there maybe thirty minutes for the first round of interviews, maybe gone ninety minutes total from work, could that work?

Sure it could. Everything was arranged, and on a Friday afternoon a week before Thanksgiving I snuck out of the office about twenty minutes after eleven, and caught a train headed downtown. I got to One World Trade Center's security desk at ten minutes to noon exactly, at which point they called upstairs to the manager I was meeting with. The call went to voicemail, they left a message, and asked me to wait on the side. 

Which I did. For fifteen minutes.

At five after, I asked security to call back upstairs again. They did, and it went to voicemail. I waited another fifteen minutes and asked them to call. Voicemail again. 

Now it was almost 12:30, and I was getting concerned. Thirty minutes of interview plus thirty minutes of travel back to midtown, give or take, meant I'd be back at my desk around 1:30, more than two hours after I'd left. I called the recruiter and filled him in.

Don't worry, he said, I'll get a hold of the guy.

Ten minutes later he calls me back: Ummmm, he's not answering his cell phone, have you heard anything?

No, and if he doesn't show up in the next ten minutes I've got to leave.

Hang on, he said, I'll track him down. 

Meanwhile, security kept calling him, to no avail. The recruiter called me a half dozen times in ten minutes to report no success. 

At ten minutes to one, fifty minutes after we were supposed to meet, the manager finally called downstairs and told security to send me up. Which they did. 

And I sat in the reception lobby upstairs for an additional ten minutes before he finally emerged. 

"Yeah, we had some issues up here this afternoon, you know, stuff happens."

I wanted to strangle him.

"You do realize I've been away from my office almost two hours already, right? We could have re-scheduled this."

"Hey, like I said, shit happens sometimes."

I met with him and another guy over the next thirty + minutes, then left, caught a train back to my office...but not before making a pit stop in my company's tax department to stash my overcoat in their rack and make a quick round of saying hello.

When I got back to my desk, my boss asked where I'd been.

"Downstairs in the tax department, they had an issue with Pro System, why?"

Hello, king of bullshit.

A day later, the recruiter called me. "So the Cantor guys were really impressed with you, they told me they're putting the numbers together to make an offer."

I laughed. "I'd be reporting to this guy directly, right? The one who kept me waiting in the lobby and refused to apologize?"

Yes, I was told.

"Tell them to forget making an offer, I won't accept. I'm not leaving a job because of an asshole boss to go work for a completely different asshole, thanks."

The recruiter went apeshit. This was a great firm, one of the best on Wall Street, I'd regret doing this forever if I walked away from it now, etc....

Well. Ten months later I didn't regret it very much.

The thing is, if not for that manager, I liked everything else enough that I would've accepted. And that means I wouldn't be writing this right now.

I think about that every single day.

By another quirk of fate, three years later I was approached by a different recruiter. "Hey, you've heard of Cantor Fitzgerald, right? I got a spot open there...."

I relayed the story to him about my previous Cantor experience.

"Wow. Well....not to sound like a dick, but chances are, nobody you met with are alive, and I'd bet they don't have your resume on file anymore."

This time around I had no hitches during the interview process, and they made me an offer I accepted. And I spent three years in the hell that had become Cantor. 

But that's a whole other story.

Quirks of fate.