Since taking up duties in the I/Net group in the spring of 2001, I had the opportunity to travel to New Jersey and New York City on occasion. My first trip to Pharmacia's Peapack N.J. corporate headquarters was to serve on a team chartered to identify collaboration goals and tools. Subsequent trips included participation in Career Path planning for IT workers and training for Vignette web content management.
Peapack is about 30 miles west of Newark Airport, well outside of the urban hustle and bustle of Manhattan and Newark. From the windows of the Headquarters buildings, one can see that the hillsides are dotted with farms and pastures. The spires of the chapels in the nearby town of Peapack are the only structures that break the horizon. The HQ buildings, acquired from an insurance agency, are laid out in an arrangement very much like a college campus.
My trips to Peapack were a flurry of activity in 2001. With the coming of Autumn, the air cleared, the leaves began to turn, and the countryside around Peapack became even more beautiful. I travelled to Peapack for Vignette training in the second week of September, while Carol was in Northern Italy for her second trip to Nerviano (Pharmacia's major R&D center near Milan), followed by a trip to Stockholm. The kids were home with Grandma and Grandpa Schmidt in Kalamazoo, and there we were, scattered around the world, on September 11th, when everything changed.
Our visits went on pretty much as planned, though with a stunned sense of unreality.
We could see the plume of smoke from what had been the World Trade Center streaming to the south, sullying an otherwise crystalline sky.
The Corporate Travel folks at Pharmacia were absolutely spectacular, making sure that everyone stranded away from home was kept in contact with their loved ones. Starting mid-week, charter-buses began running from New Jersey to Michigan, Chicago, and St. Louis, making the round trip about every 24 hours. On Friday afternoon, after domestic air travel had been shut down for 4 days, Vignette training had completed. We were getting ready to board the bus to Kalamazoo when the corporate jet was freed up. The last of us got on the jet and got back to Kalamazoo, arriving an hour before our initial travel plans had called for! Carol also got the first commercial jet out of Sweden, and was back home early the next morning.
We were all able to stay in touch via phone and e-mail, but it was nerve-wracking being separated, in three different locales, during this time of stress.
I returned to the area a month and a half later, to spend a day at our New Jersey facilities to do some presentations and the rest of the week in Manhattan for additional Vignette training. The morning after I arrived, the Jamaica-bound jet crashed in Queens, spooking us all once again. That day's Vignette presentations were another blur of unreality.
Driving into Manhattan that evening with a colleague, the tense atmosphere was palpable, with the absence of traffic and the heavy presence of police in the Holland Tunnel. We could hardly find our way to the SoHo Grand, with the blocked-off streets in the vicinity of the WTC. After checking in to the hotel, we left to walk to a nearby restaurant. Again, the sense of unreality - a beautiful evening, moderate temperatures, and an absence of people on the streets of SoHo. We got turned around while walking, and asked a passerby directions. He was extremely helpful (not my usual experience in Manhattan), and commiserated with the difficulty navigating in lower Manhattan without the familiar WTC on the skyline to provide an orientation landmark.
During the Vignette training, a large group of us walked to the boarded-up area around the WTC recovery. The autumn weather was spectacular, but the motes in the air from the WTC debris were very visible. As we got within a few blocks, the talking subsided, and a reverent silence fell over the walkers. A contradictory feeling of isolation and community hit me - here I was, standing with hundreds of strangers, looking at the ruins of the WTC, sharing a similar sense of horror, resolve, and shock. Conversation resumed as we left the area to return to class.
After 18 months of running a successful intranet service for Pharmacia & Upjohn, we learned that Pfizer was to acquire the company. Our group, in particular, was approached early on, as we would be responsible for setting up internally-facing web sites for the transition. "How much will setting up these new sites cost?" was the main question; "Nothing" was my answer, to the shock and surprise of the Pfizer folks. Evidently, they did not have such a service, and were used to spending hundreds of thousands of dollars for the sort of thing our service was set up to do for free. "How long will it take?" was the inevitable next question. "Give us 72 hours before you want them to go live" was my answer. Again, stunned silence. How could this be?
We generated the new HR web site in about 18 hours, charged nothing, and it was up and running before people returned to work the next morning. Any changes? No? I guess we're done then.
I got an invitation from an executive director of HR to come to Pfizer headquarters in New York City to discuss our service, and how we did our work so quickly. I planned a three-day stay, and anticipated that I'd be asked for a budget and staffing proposal to keep our group afloat after the acquisition. I did the technical overview, discussed our experience, and was asked to leave the big, main executive conference room for a minute.
My sponsor came out and said "Well, I tried. They're not going to keep your service going, however sensible and great it is. When are you heading back to Kalamazoo?" Two days hence. "Well, go have yourself some fabulous meals, explore Manhattan, see some Broadway shows, and then send me your expense report. I'll make sure it gets approved."
By then, Carol had been refreshing connections and was well on her way to getting numerous job offers. More on that elsewhere.
Last Updated February 02, 2024