The Y Files

This remembrance is dedicated to those folks working in the World Trade Center on September 11th, 2001, whom I did business with prior to that day.

I knew them mostly from phone calls and from an ACT Contact-Management Database, as I worked primarily from our office in Clifton Park, New York. But they helped me become a successful product manager for industrial controls equipment, which advanced my career. I never got to say thank you, and so I say it now.

An Engineer's Work-Life Leading to 9/11

I started working as a Product Manager at SIXNET-Digitronics, a company founded in the 1970s by a couple of very smart RPI electrical engineering graduates, in January of 2000. After receiving a generous letter of offer, I was given great flexibility in what distributors and end-customers I could pursue around the globe. A large part of my pay was connected to signing up new industrial modem and I/O customers.

Part of my attraction to SIXNET was its international focus. Being a long-time "worldie" – I had inter-railed across the entire continent of Europe twice in the 1980s - it was exciting to work for a technology company that actively pursued business in Europe, Asia, Africa, and other far-flung regions distant from New York's Capital Region.

Chemical plants in Brazil, off-shore rigs in Denmark, and other tough-environment places around the globe were prime existing and potential users of our ruggedized, cutting-edge industrial-specification electronic equipment. My boss had no fear of traveling to places like India and China at a moment's notice if there was an opportunity to develop new business in a booming market. I was amazed with his intrepidness and his entrepreneurial spirit!

Inspired by my boss's Team America, almost patriotic, export spirit, and given geographic flexibility over which companies I could pursue on my own, I chased after prospects in Holland, Germany, Australia, Denmark, Finland, Ukraine, Great Britain, and the Middle East.

Countries outside the U.S. were all on my regular phone call and email list, and many prospects I worked with personally became regular customers. Before September 11th, I had even traveled to Haarlem, The Netherlands, alongside my boss on the flight, giving a presentation on our latest industrial-spec technology – fiber-optic industrial network switches among them - to a Europe-wide distribution network that I had played a role in building. These were heady times compared with today's economy!

Memories from the Day of September 11th

My colleague and comrade in arms for promoting industrial modems and I/O to the global audience was at a trade show in Texas on the morning of September 11th, along with our mutual boss, president of our small Clifton Park, New York company. So my direct boss and office-mate were both gone, and our accounts receivable specialist kept me company that day.

I remember early on that cool morning, Sylvia asked me to come to her desk, and told me, in hushed and bewildered tones, that a plane had just hit one of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Immediately, my thought was that this was some type of accident, and I tried to comfort my colleague - and myself - by saying this to Sylvia. At the time, along with my own industrial controls clients I had working in the towers, my youngest sister also drove south from Albany once per week to do para-legal work in one of the towers.

- Larry Kelley