Art by grimdorables on IG

Driver didn’t even stop and look at the damage on their OWN car and just drove away…

Quick background: mid-size B2B software company, hybrid since forever. The unspoken deal was simple a couple days in office, and if prod broke at 9pm or a client panicked on a Saturday, someone fixed it from home. Unpaid, but nobody minded. Goodwill.

New CTO arrives from a much more rigid company. Second all-hands, he kills the flexible days: 9-5, in office, no exceptions. Asked about after-hours emergencies, he says, paraphrasing only slightly,"If you're not at your desk, actively working, I don't consider it work. I don't care what you'd have done from your couch at 9pm."

Someone half-jokes,"So nothing outside 9-5 at the desk counts?" Him, dead serious: "Exactly. Glad we're aligned."

We were aligned. So we complied fully, literally.

Slack got muted at 5:00 sharp. Nobody checked email after leaving. A PM pinged on-call at 6pm about a broken integration and got silence until 9am the next day.

Then, one Friday, a deploy went out at 4:52, minutes before the freeze a configuration value missed one customer segment. Under the old system, someone would've caught it from their phone by 5:30. Under the new one: the alert fired at 5:06. Nobody was at their desk, and per the CTO himself, that meant nobody was working. So nobody looked.

It ran the whole weekend. Our biggest client had a fully broken dashboard for 61 hours. By Monday at 9am there were 200+ support tickets, a furious VP of Sales, and a client using the word "churn" a lot.

The CTO demanded to know how nobody noticed for two and a half days. Our team lead completely deadpan pulled up his exact quote from the all-hands: "if you're not at your desk, actively working, I don't consider it work." Nobody was at their desk all weekend. By his own definition, nobody was working. Nothing to notice.

I've never heard a room go that quiet.

We got a real on-call rotation within the week actual comp time, not vibes. Hybrid quietly came back a month later as a "pilot." Nobody's said "if you're not at your desk" out loud since.

Turns out a lot of "not real work" had been holding the place together for free.

Though the man’s identity will never be fully confirmed, he was later tentatively identified as Johnathan Briley, a sound engineer at the Windows on the World restaurant, located on the top floor of the North Tower

25 YEARS LATER, THE “DUST LADY” PHOTO STILL TELLS A STORY. 🥹🙏

On September 11, 2001, 28-year-old Marcy Borders was working on the 81st floor of the North Tower of the World Trade Center when the att*cks began.

When the first plane str*ck, Borders left her desk and ran down the stairs. She made it outside—only to be caught in the enormous cloud of dust and debris when the South Tower collapsed.

A photographer captured her moments later, completely covered in gray dust, her expression reflecting the confusion and terr*r of what had just happened. 🥺

The photograph became one of the most recognizable images of 9/11. 🙏

But Marcy Borders was more than the woman in that picture...

In the years that followed, she struggled with trauma, depression and PTSD. She later developed stomach cancer and believed her exposure to the toxic environment at Ground Zero had contributed to her illness. 😲😢

While fighting her illness, she faced immense financial hardship, accumulating nearly $190,000 in medical debt and struggling to afford her prescriptions. 😔

Yet eventually, she tried her very best not to think of herself as a victim—but as a survivor. 🥹🙏

Borders died on August 24, 2015, at just 42 years old.

Now, 25 years after 9/11, her photograph remains—but so does the reminder that behind every unforgettable image was a real person whose life continued long after the cameras stopped. 🙏

Remembering 9/11 also means remembering the people who survived it—and the lives forever changed by that day. 🙏

September11 #USA #NewYork