"The morning I almost died on Wall Street"

Monday morning. 10am. Thirty minutes after the stock market opening bell.

I am pulled out of an intense bout of concentration by a hard slap on my back from my boss.

"Pull your trades and get the hell out of the building.”

Get Morning Coffee ☕ in your inbox. Sign up here.

Those were the words that were spoken, but all I heard was the sheer expression of horror dominating his face.

Inaction. Paralysis.

For what felt like an eternity, but must have been no more than a fraction of a second.

Then a dead sprint to the stairwell. If everyone else was running, I was going to run too.

Terrorist attack? Fire? Had our entire division just been dissolved?

Rationality was impossible. Instinct was unavoidable.

The stairwell is at first eerily quiet. More than a hundred of the world’s most intelligent, resourceful, inventive individuals, completely out of their element. An army of “I got this” personalities who don’t got this. Directors without direction. Controllers without control. Risk managers facing actual risk.

The effect is crippling, but the descent commences.

Floor 47. 46. 45.

No one is going fast enough.

Then the whispers begin.

Airplane. Something about an airplane.

Really, airplane? Shouldn’t we already be dead if an airplane had hit the building? But then again, it took the towers some time to fall. So maybe this is a race against time. Maybe the building is already on its way down and we have to beat it there.

The pregnant woman in front of me is not going fast enough.

The stairwell is too crowded to pass, and no one wants to be that guy forcing his way past a pregnant woman during a mass evacuation. I briefly consider asking if she would like help, imagining that a survivor might later tell the heroic tale of how I went down with honor.

Then I wonder if it might be useful to have an HOV lane.

With maximum speed unattainable, natural instinct takes over again and the multitasking begins.

The BlackBerrys emerge in force.

No one makes a phone call, unwilling to translate confused emotions into audible words, but the just-in-case “I love you” text messages must have been ubiquitous. I manage to send one before shouts of “get off the freakin’ BlackBerrys” cause me to slip mine back into my pocket.

They were right. My father would have been pleased to hear from me in my final moments, but he would have been even more pleased if these were not my final moments.

It doesn’t matter though. No one is going fast enough.

Floor 39. 38.

“Twenty five percent of the way there.”

Even in the face of death, long division is not a problem for PhDs in economics. The triathletes begin to get frustrated with the mathletes.

Floor 23. 22.

Calves burning. Moans of fatigue and fear.

I search for a familiar face.

“How you doing?” he asks

I want to tell him how my brain has accepted death, but my mind still believes in my invincibility. All I manage is a weak “alright,” which comes out as “right,” my voice cracking on the first syllable.

Floor 10. 9.

The end is in sight. Maybe I will make it after all.

But how does one go back from death to life? And now my mysterious text messages are going to cause some unnecessary concern. I better call as soon as I get down to let everyone know that everything is fine.

With one final burst, we spill out of the stairwell, into the lobby, and through the front door.

Oxygen. Daylight.

No screams. No blood. No debris.

I look up. The building is still standing.

Just chaos on the street. Feverish phone calls, text messages, and emails as people declare their “alrightness” and try to figure out what happened.

Then the email from corporate headquarters.

Air Force One, followed closely by an F-16 fighter jet, had flown just a little too close to our building during a photo shoot.

A photo shoot?

No apology. No explanation. Just the information, delivered with the calm neutrality normally reserved for system maintenance alerts.

It better have been a damn good photograph.

Michael Sloyer is a leadership development coach at Upbuild and a former Managing Director at Goldman Sachs. Find out more information about his work at www.upbuild.com. You can read more about the incident in this article here. 

Have a confidential story, tip, or comment you’d like to share? Contact: +44 7537 182250 (SMS, WhatsApp or voicemail). Telegram: @SarahButcher. Signal: sarahbutcher.22  Click here to fill in our anonymous form, or email editortips@efinancialcareers.com. 

Bear with us if you leave a comment at the bottom of this article: comments are moderated intermittently by human beings. Sometimes these humans might be asleep, or away from their desks, so it may take a while for your comment to appear. You must take sole responsibility for comments you post on this site. We will take reasonable steps to weed out anything that we consider to be offensive or inappropriate.