WinCit Finance

Chicago, IL

O n September 11th, 2001, I was fired from my job as a software developer.
 
 

A fter the terrorist attacks. That’s an important distinction to make, because workers that are merely unproductive or sub-par don’t get fired on such a day. You have to be a pretty terrible employee—a top-to-toe jackass—for your boss to remember to fire you a few short hours after learning the world is ending.

In my defense, there were extenuating circumstances: I was hungover. I have worked full time since the age of sixteen and this is the only time I have lost a job due to a hangover. Which, when you consider how much I used to drink, is uncommonly impressive. It’s like an airline with a single late arrival in its history.

Often, when I arrived at work, the first words I would hear would be something like, “HOLY SHIT! I did NOT expect to see you today!” from some coworker who was out with me the night before. I often learned how crazy my night was from others, never my own memories. That’s not to say I blacked out—I usually remembered everything—but I consider one’s own memories a useless gauge because, in the Great Play of Drinking, there are only two characters: Self and Other. And Self always thinks it’s doing just fine.

Self believes that it is always speaking with the perfect touch of humor and nimbly moving between topics.

Other says that you are repeating the same story over and over, so loudly people three rooms away are afraid to become stuck talking to you.

Self feels proud, happy for kicking the party into a higher gear by starting a dance floor.

Other yells that you are knocking over drinks and that this is a studio apartment, not a bar.

Self thinks one more bar—a night cap!—would be the perfect ending.

Other screams that you start work in four hours and are missing a shoe.

See, there are two things you can’t effectively do to your own body: One is tickle it, and the other is rate how drunk it is. (Side note: If you do manage to tickle yourself, you’re probably pretty shit-faced.)

In order to self-assess one’s level of inebriation, you must deduce your state of drunkenness from what The Other says. If people are repeatedly asking you questions like, “Don’t you have to work tomorrow?” or “Please tell me you aren’t driving home!” you are drunk, no matter what Self is telling you.

W  hat we forget about September 11th, 2001, is that September 10th, 2001, was like any other day; which meant I was doing what I usually did in those days: drinking until dawn. When I explain that I was out until sunrise the night before the attacks people often respond, “Wasn’t September 11th on a Tuesday?”

“Yes,” I reply, “yes it was.”

That day I woke up an hour past the start of work and immediately panicked. I was supposed to be giving a presentation in twenty minutes’ time. I did not know it but The Twin Towers had already been hit by planes and the rest of America was dealing with the knowledge that the country was under attack.

As far as I was concerned, the main danger that I was facing that day was imminent dismissal from my job. I jumped out of bed, put on some deodorant and the clothes from the previous night, brushed my teeth and then Febrezed my entire body. Back then you could smoke in bars so your clothes stunk if you wore them the night before. You could always identify the drunks at work because their clothes smelled like a bonfire, but not mine, after spraying them, my clothes smelled like a lemon tree. A lemon tree that someone had set on fire the previous night.

WHAT THE HELL AM I READING HERE?

Hi. My name is Sean Bair-Flannery. I live in Oak Park, Illinois, with my wife Jessica and our three kids. I perform standup comedy at night and during the day I fix computers.

 

This is chapter from my book, “Places I Can’t Return To”.

 

Each week, I release a new chapter (the current one completes below). If you enjoy the stories, you can buy the full book below or, next week, you can come back and read the subsequent chapter.

 

Purchase Full Book:

    Digital                                 $4.99

    Paperback                   $14.99

    Audio                                     $19.99

 

This book is true stories, but it is not a memoir. It is a more an illustration — maybe a warning — of what your life will look like if you decide to live everyday like it’s your last. I actually followed that advice. I followed it for a good fifteen years.

 

I can’t re-enter most the places I visited in that time.

—S. B-F

I ran out the door and boarded the train within five minutes of waking up. This is how I used to “get ready” for work, like a fireman answering a three-alarm blaze. I wonder what it must have looked like to my neighbors. I ran out of the apartment every morning like I was escaping a gas leak. There was never time for breakfast or coffee or to even verify that socks and shoes matched. One time I got to work, went straight into a meeting, and while I was answering a question, a pair of underwear and a sock dropped from inside my pants and onto the floor. I had put my pants on so hurriedly that morning, I didn’t notice the underwear and socks were still inside the legs.

So there I was, on the train, riding to downtown Chicago with about a hundred, confused, afraid Americans who are all processing a tragedy. And then there’s me: a wholly-clueless, uninformed man with a terrible hangover.

For me, the main effect of a hangover is that I lose my wits. The world doesn’t seem any slower to me—I know it’s spinning at the same rate—but I cannot observe, interpret, or react to it at my normal speed. It’s as though my eyes, ears, and brain have aged fifty years overnight. I always beam when people say I’m smart. Not because I’m insecure and need validation but because I consider it a great compliment when you realize that I wake up every day as a moron. When I was growing up, my brother Paul had a large, impressive train set that spanned across a model city he had built. Every morning our youngest brother Brendan would wake up first, play with the set, and in doing so, destroy the entire thing. Hours later, Paul would wake up and fastidiously rebuild it again. That’s also how my brain works: I rebuild it each morning.

A specific example of that dimness: I did not notice our answering machine was blinking with a new message as I rushed out of the apartment, slamming the door blindly. This was back when cellphones were less common and, usually, when I left the apartment I looked at the answering machine in the hallway to see if I missed a call; to see if my plans would be changed. That day I did not look at the machine, and therefore did not hear that new message until the following day.

It was my roommate, calling to warn me:

“Hey Sean, it’s Paul. Calling from work. I know you got in pretty late last night so you might be just waking up and... A major attack is going on. Planes have flown into the Twin Towers. It’s pretty bad. Your office might already be closed: you should check. Anyway, mostly wanted to share just, so, ya know, you don’t make an ass of yourself.”

That last line proved to be prophetic.
 

The train moved underground and I began to feel unwell, like I might pass out. I only had one more stop but I was worried I would vomit before we reached the station. I pushed my way to the back of the train to have more space and buckled over against the back wall.

A very young man, probably college-age, saw me struggling and in a community-spirited kind of way, sought to reassure me:

“Hey, sir, hey sir: You’re gonna be OK. OK? We all will.”

He was, of course, talking about the 9/11 attacks.

But as I knew nothing about that, I assumed he had merely recognized that I was hungover and sought to give me some solace. As we pulled into my station, I turned to the guy, smiled, and said:

“Pal, this isn’t even one of my ten worst mornings.” and walked off the train.

As I exited the station, I started to piece together why I was feeling so unwell. It wasn’t so much a hangover, not directly. I noticed a distinctly prophylactic smell emanating from me as well as white marks where the color has been rubbed out of my slacks. It was then I realized I had not Febrezed my clothes: I had grabbed the wrong bottle and sprayed OxiClean over everything. Thanks to haste and hangover, I did not notice that the first thing I did that morning was to cover myself in an all-killing bleach.

When I look back at all the peacock-ish mistakes I’ve made in life, I sometimes wonder if the bystanders remember the events as vividly as me. For instance: The kid who tried to reassure me that everything would be okay. He had to be left wondering, “What in the hell kind of life has this lunatic businessman lead to emphatically state that planes flying into buildings, the country in a panic, does not crack his top ten shittiest mornings?”

I climbed the stairs, and upon reaching street level and the fresh air, began to feel kind of normal again. My clothes looked ridiculous but I figured if I had good luck with the elevators, I should only be a few minutes late for my first meeting. I felt optimistic, until I saw the mad rush of people I would be working against to reach the office.

My building was a block past DePaul University’s Loop Campus which had just canceled classes due to The Attacks. So at that point there was a large, mad rush of students pushing against me and trying to get on the train, while I marched to the office in the opposite direction. As I passed through the mass, I overheard disconnected statements of fear and worry as well as a phrase which I thought was “bomb threat.” But even then, I concluded they were referring to the “Old College Bomb Threat.” You know the one: Some fraternity slacker didn’t study for their finals so they forced a pledge to phone in a bomb threat to cancel school and give them another day to cram.

I reached the office and was immediately pulled into a large conference room. Our CIO was standing in front of and addressing a large group of people:

“This is a scary morning. No one knows what’s going on. Some of you are hearing different things. We feel the appropriate response is to close the office. Go home, be safe and be with your families.”

Now of course for the CIO, this was a solemn duty: Trying to discharge and provide comfort to a room full of nervous, dejected people; worried about the events unfolding on the news and what that meant for the future of the country. But as far as I was concerned (and blithely assumed everyone else was on the same page) he was overreacting to what was clearly a fake bomb threat next door at De Paul.

Believing myself to be the beneficiary of some moron’s attempt to get out of test, I yelled, “YES!” and raised my hand for someone to high five me; possibly, the most inappropriate high five ever requested.

Because I’d entered late, I was situated near the front of the conference room, behind management and visible to everyone. I turned to the engineer nearest me, my arm still raised, still asking for a high-five, and announced almost-giddily: “Oh yeah, my man! Home by noon!”

The guy really didn’t want to high-five me but I forced the issue.

The room was quiet except for my one happy yelp. I remember the CIO staring at me in bewilderment, along with my immediate boss, the head of eBusiness. I started walking towards the door, exposing white zebra stripes up and down my clothes where the cleaning agent had eaten away the color. Just before exiting, I turned and broke the silence with:

“Boys; I’m gonna get a haircut.”

Then I walked out: first from the conference room, then the office and, eventually—as I learned a few hours later—that entire corporation.
 

A few hours after leaving, I learned of the attacks and when my boss called to fire me later, I considered it important that he knew that I did not know about the terrorist attacks during that meeting.

“Christ, Sean, I know that. You’re not an asshole. You’re being fired because you show up an hour late every day. And if you’re wondering why we picked today; it’s not even the awkwardness of how you acted. It’s more that you are the Head of Software Security and the entire office just saw that you somehow made it to work, as the head of security, without learning about the biggest terrorist attack in modern history.”

“Also,” he added, “if we are leveling with each other: that weird, disappearing ink outfit you were wearing didn’t help.”