Building 30

An office remodel is the reason I spent September 11th in Mission Control 25 years ago.

I worked in Building 45 at Johnson Space Center. That summer they were doing some kind of upgrade to our floor, and everybody on it got scattered into whatever space anyone could find. I ended up in a strange little hole of an office in Building 30.

Yes, that Building 30, otherwise known as the Mission Control Center. The building with the consoles in it. The room this country built so that when something happened a quarter of a million miles away, somebody down here could read the signal and know what it meant.

And I was sitting in it because of a remodel.

Building 30 had televisions even in the random offices, which struck me as odd at the time and seems obvious now. That’s how we saw it. I called my wife at home. She was sick that day and working from the house, and I told her to turn on the TV. That was right when the planes hit the World Trade Center.

Then the Pentagon got hit, and her uncle worked there.

Nobody could reach him. Nobody knew where he was. That went on for hours.

They told us we could go home. By then JSC had air cover overhead and was about the safest ground in Texas, so leaving had nothing to do with safety. I wanted to stay. We had information coming into that building that was better than anything on the networks, and I remember thinking that very clearly. Better sources, faster, and closer to the truth. If you’re going to understand a day like that, you stay where the good data is.

She called and asked me to come home. I said I’d be there in a few hours.

She called back and yelled at me to come home.

I was irritated. My wife called me twice on the worst day in modern American history, and the second time, I got annoyed. I had my reasons, and they were even pretty good ones. I was in the one building in Houston where you could actually tell what was going on, and it was incredibly safe. She was asking me to leave it so I could sit in a house where all we’d have was the same TV coverage everyone else was watching.

I went home. Not because I understood, but because she yelled.

It took me years to figure out what that second phone call actually was.

She wasn’t asking for information. She was asking for me.

Her uncle was missing inside a burning building, she was alone in a house with the news on, and the one thing she could do about any of it was get her husband home. I heard a request to leave a place where I thought I might be useful. What she was really saying was that she was scared and needed somebody there.

Her uncle turned out to be fine.

Mission Control exists for exactly one reason. Somebody has to be listening carefully enough to know what the signal means. Not just to receive it, but to understand it.

I was in the building. I just wasn’t listening.

I’ve spent the twenty-five years since then in jobs that are mostly about information: getting it, moving it, and making sure the right person has it at the right moment. I’m good at it. And the lesson of that day, the one I was too boneheaded to get at the time, is that the most important message you get is rarely the one with the most data in it.

When somebody calls twice, the second call is never about what they said the first time.