dark typewriter

today, aug. 28, is my 5th anniversary day of working at a worldwide wire service with offices downtown.

among my most memorable non-work writing experiences there is a fire evacuation we had to endure because the mercantile exchange caught fire - we were stuck in the stairwells between floors over the 20th for over a half hour. if the fire were bigger, we prolly would have been in huge trouble. i wondered if this was what it was like for employees trying to escape the doomed world trade center towers in new york city, only two years before the fire at the merc.

we exited the building and, unlike many other companies who called it a day (it was already around 6 or 7 p.m.), we hung around and sent a couple other reporters to our thomson center office to continue filing. we asked our springfield office to cover the regular stuff. everyone on duty stood by for instructions while the managers ran back and forth trying to find out what was going on.

from inside the building, with only a couple cameras in tow, one of our missing photographers suddenly showed up but stood looking at us, goofily dumbfounded, wondering why we were outside when inside was the fire. hehehe.  ¶ 8/28/2005 06:02:00 PM