the corner office

September 11, 1999 saw me on a plane home to South Africa, from a holiday in the USA and UK. It was my first trip overseas and part of that included a week and a half spent in New York. I expected New York to be the highlight of my trip, and I wasn't let down. From the people, the mood, the diversity, the feeling of living in a true urban jungle, the beauty, the size, the sheer magnitude and magnificence of the place blew me away. In that month I saw New York, Boston and London (and a chunk of the Thames Valley where my sister lives). But my overriding experience was falling in love with New York.

One of the pictures I have of that trip, includes a picture looking up at the Twin Towers from the road that ran between them. We relied on a tour bus for transport (the buses did a round trip of uptown and downtown Manhattan every hour, and a week's pass on the tour bus was a lot cheaper than taxis or the subway). Every trip downtown included a drive between the two towers, under the mirror-bottomed bridge that connected them. I never went into the towers, since the tour guide advised us that the view from the Empire State Building was a lot better, and cheaper to boot.

A little over two years later, and those towers were no more.

9/11 will always humble me. When I was on that plane on 11 September 1999, I wanted more than anything to move to New York and spend a couple of years as a New Yorker. I started scouting for jobs, I started researching visa options. If my local dotcom opportunity hadn't come along, I might have actually followed through, and I might have landed work in the US. I might have been in New York when it happened. The odds are getting out of hand now, but I might have been in one of those towers. I know it happened to South Africans just like me. Irrespective; living in that great city, would have been a small dream come true. How many people in those towers were simply living out their dreams?

The politics of 9/11 will rage on for years, but to the people who lost loved ones, the politics don't matter. Not today.