Twenty years ago, in 2001, September 11 was a Tuesday.
"Ruby Tuesday" - The Rolling Stones
A lifetime ago, before I went to law school, I worked for my older brother. Kelly owned a construction company and like many an owner, he crafted a set of "rules" by which all of us who worked for him were expected to abide. Among them was that we never referred to Tuesday as Tuesday. Rather, in our parlance it was "the Day after Monday". To my brother's way of thinking, Monday got a bad rap. Sure, for many it is the traditional start of the work week but it is also a day immediately preceded by (again for those who work a traditional work week) two days off. Monday was not a villian. See, the last time before Monday you had worked was Friday, after which you had been rewarded with two consecutive days off! Oh no, Monday was harmless. Tuesday, which was the day that exposed the flimsy artifice you had constructed in order to make Monday doable, was the real villian of the piece. It was the week's worst day. Every week.
Twenty years ago, the second Tuesday of September proved to be far worse than even my brother had ever feared it could be.
Zhanetta Tsoy had first joined Marsh McLennan Companies as an Accountant in the Almaty, Kazakhstan office of Marsh Insurance Brokers LLP in September 1997. Born in Uzbekistan in 1968, she had attended the Almaty Institute of National Economics from 1987 to 1991 and, thereafter, attained her MBA at the Kazakhstan Institute of Management Economics and Strategy Research in 1996.
In 2001, she obtained her green card. It was her dream to come to live and work in America. Marsh McLennan made that dream a reality, transferring her to the company's New York City offices, which were located in both towers of the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, Marsh McLennan had 845 employees at work in its offices located on floors 93 to 100 of One World Trade Center, the North Tower and another 934 employees at work in its offices located on floors 48 through 54 of Two World Trade Center, the South Tower. At 8:46 am, lead hijacker Mohamed Atta deliberately flew hijacked American Airlines Flight 11 into the North Tower, impacting the building between its 93rd and 99th floors.
It had only been approximately one month earlier that Zhanetta Tsoy, her husband Vyacheslav Ligay, and the couple's four-year-old daugher, Alexandra, had arrived in America and settled into their new home, which was an apartment in Jersey City, New Jersey. On August 23, less than three weeks before that terrible Tuesday morning, she, Vyacheslav, and Alexandra had gone sightseeing in Manhattan. She took them to the World Trade Center to see the building where she would soon go to work.
Her first day at Marsh's office in One World Trade Center was Tuesday, September 11, 2001. She was so excited to get to the office and to get going on this brand new adventure that she left home in such a hurry she forgot to eat breakfast. She did not want to be late on her first day on the job.
Tragically, she was not. When American Airlines Flight 11 struck the North Tower at 8:46 am, Zhanetta was among the 845 Marsh employees in the office. She was one of 295 killed that morning.
Zhanetta Tsoy was just 32 years young. Her adorable little girl, Alexandra, was just four.
Mick and Keith were right all along. Life is indeed unkind.
-AK
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