The September 11th attack
Fears of workers linger
Associated Press
Ray Vigil's waiters still set the tables, but some nights the news has such a grip on people that his restaurant is nearly empty. Richard Rollins has returned to his desk at a Boston office complex, but now he is stopped each morning by a platoon of security guards. Back in her flight attendant's uniform, Cyndi Schulte has returned to the sky, but isn't sure she wants to be there anymore.
They and millions of other Americans went back to work shouldering memories of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, only to find that the same old routines are eerily different now.
In places usually devoted to making a living, workers made time to embrace and to weep. They queued at factory gates, office buildings and the entrances to parking garages, fishing for ID cards they'd almost forgotten they had. They have returned to countless hours of staring into computer screens, only to find themselves turning to the window nervously to study every passing jet.
Even for the great majority of workers whose colleagues are all accounted for, and whose jobs are not threatened by the fallout of the attacks, returning to work is far from returning to normal.
Work, it is said, defines who we are. But in recent days, it's become clear it is not that simple. Americans are not quite the same people as they were two Mondays ago and, at least for the moment, the changes inside us and around us are redefining the way we work.
'Need time to regroup'
Flight attendant Cyndi Schulte wheeled her suitcase, along with a heavy load of misgivings, Friday morning through the Minneapolis-St. Paul International Airport.
Just hours earlier, her employer, Northwest Airlines, had announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs. It joined most other carriers in slashing schedules and laying off workers because of a slowdown in air travel following the attacks.
But after 18 years on the job, Schulte said her biggest fear is that she won't be sent home.
"I feel I shouldn't be out here right now," Schulte said. "I look at my passengers differently. I need to take some time to regroup."
Schulte has applied for a five-month voluntary leave of absence offered by the company. But despite her seniority she fears she won't get it. Northwest has not announced how many will be allowed the leave.
Others have decided they must forge ahead. Her colleague, Peter Fiske, said he's considered walking away from his profession.
"But then I thought to myself, if I don't go back right away, I'm not sure I could ever go back," he said.
Streets covered in ash
Just two days after the Sept. 11 attacks, Jeannette Rosario and her colleagues at the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp. were among the first workers to venture back to their desks in lower Manhattan.
Rosario, whose company processes the stock and bond transactions that make Wall Street go, picked her way through streets still blanketed in a gritty coat of pulverized concrete. That night, after hours of laboring to help ready the company for the reopening of the stock markets, she slept in the office, then went back to work.
But working in her office in a tower on Water Street still gave her pause.
"You sit next to the window," she said, "and keep on thinking, 'Am I going to turn around and see a plane coming?"'
Restaurant empty
Ray Vigil's restaurant has a menu with prices set to keep customers coming in, even when things are tough. But in the nights since the attacks, Vigil and his staff at Scarpas, an Italian eatery in Albuquerque, N.M., have tried to keep pace with wild swings in business that seem to ebb and flow with each day's news.
"During the president's speech, this restaurant was basically empty," Vigil said last week. But when the speech ended, "there was a small rush."
Vigil said he and his waiters aren't too worried about a war or a downturn in the economy.
Those are the times when people go out to eat in search of a little escape, as they did last weekend, he said.
"People got tired of watching television when the weekend rolled around," he said. "We ended up having one of the biggest weekends we've ever had."
But even as they seek to relax, Vigil said, the concerns of the day are following people in the door. Many families are coming in in large groups, spending hours at tables talking about the attacks and the aftermath.
"That seemed to be the conversation at every single table," he said. "That's what everybody needed. They just needed to talk about it."
