Today is that awful anniversary of 9-11. Being deaf, it presented some challenges that day. I was in my office when the first plane struck the first tower. I walked into my supervisor's office and she had the tv on, and it wasn't captioned. A group of employees were gathered around the television, and someone said a plane had crashed into the tower.
Stupidly, the first thought that occurred to me, was that someone at the FAA was in big trouble. It did not sink right away in that it was a terrorist attack. I went back to my office. Then my blackberry pager vibrated. It was my mother, The text read, "Get the Hell out of Dodge, there are fires...".
I walked back into my office, muttering, what fires? and texted her back, saying I'm fine, there are no fires, I'm fine. Then the blackberry text pager quit working. I thought maybe I had a bad battery in the pager. Back then, I had a blackberry text pager that ran on a single AA battery. The pager was manufactured by WyndTell for GoAmerica.
My mother had driven long distance from home (she had recently moved elsewhere to be near my younger sister and some of my nieces and nephews) that day to visit relatives and I had teased her in an e-mail before the trip, saying, why don't you just take a plane? My mother said no, she enjoyed driving.
I went back to my supervisor's office, where she had hung up the phone in shock. She said we are evacuating the building and are to go home. Just then the security guards ran down the hallway, pounding on doors, saying, evacuate, evacuate. Well, I live 24 miles away from my office downtown, and had no way home as I take public transit. My supervisor gave me and another co-worker a ride back to suburbia that day. It was absolutely surreal. There were traffic jams everywhere, and it took me nearly two hours to get home. During the car trip with my supervisor and my co-worker, my co-worker was telling me what the radio was saying, which at the time wasn't accurate. It was one-thirty by the time I reached my home. The light on the Caller ID was blinking. I saw that my sisters had called, my other relatives had called. I turned on the TTY and dialed the TTY (this was before CapTel) and the relay operator came on and said please limit your calls to five minutes each, this is a national emergency, so I must limit your calls. I said okay, I just want to tell my family I am okay. I first called my supervisor and told her I got home safely. She said, Mindy, thank you so much for calling, I am so glad you got home safely. I next called my relatives and said I was safe and at home. They were relieved. I fixed myself a sandwich, got a drink, and turned on the television to watch the news, which was captioned.
A day later, when my mother e-mailed me, I said to her, I will never make fun of you again for not taking a plane to visit your aunt and your sister. I am so glad you did not fly anywere. I thought of my father, and was thankful that he did not live to see this horrible tragedy. He died 24 years ago. He had a heart ailment and died in his sleep.
I went back to work the next day, and continued to go to work until that weekend. I refused to be scared, but looking back, I was scared after all. I was so jumpy and jittery. Everytime someone dropped a box on the floor or I would see a cardboard box, I got nervous.
Even today, emergency evacuations for disabled people in office buildings are not perfect. My organization is supposed to text my pager when the fire alarm goes off. That hasn't happened. The deal is, my co-workers alert me. The people in my corridor know I am deaf, so they are pretty good about making sure I am out of the building when the fire alarm goes off.
I will still depend on some kind of visual alerting system after I get the cochlear implant and have it activated. I am getting a wireless one that runs on rechargeable batteries so I don't have to worry about power failures in case of a bad thunderstorm.
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