#mattsienkiewicz

by Sara Morrison and Matt Sienkiewicz ‘03

  When looking back on our Amper legacy, one issue sticks out in particular, and it’s one that almost never happened at all. But for our tremendous bravery in the face of adversity, the September 18, 2001,edition of the Argus would have been sans Ampersand. This is our story.

 Sara woke up at 8 a.m. for her freshman physics seminar. She was a junior, but thanks to a typographical error in the course book, managed to register for the course. Barely awake, she arrived at class and listened to a lecture from Professor Shapiro, a charming, effective speaker whose son had recently written a touching memoir about cancer, family, and the benefits of medical marijuana.

 Matt woke up a half hour later, the previous night having been a difficult one. His father, struggling at the time with drug and alcohol addiction, had called with bad news, keeping Matt up late into the night. He looked forward to the brisk walk up Williams Street to his philosophy seminar with Professor Stephen Horst, who was ok.

 Halfway up Matt’s ascent, the world changed. A man, who did not attend Wesleyan but lived in Middletown anyway and thus was not to be trusted, demanded that Matt come into his house.

 “Look at what they did!” he screamed, pointing at the television. Matt had no idea what the man meant, although he thought it was probably racist. Later that day Matt changed his mind, deciding the man probably wasn’t being racist and he ought to give him the benefit of the doubt, giving the circumstance. In 2014, however, it again sounds probably racist.

 As Matt pondered the possibly racist man’s kind -- if oddly timed -- offer of a drink, he watched Flight 175 strike the south building of the World Trade Center. The north building was already billowing smoke.

Sara arrived home after class, unaware that anything had happened -- that the world had changed forever. She went “online” and signed on to AOL Instant Messenger. An NYU student and friend of her boyfriend-- whose “screenname” was “Poopdeck McGee[1],”-- “instant messaged” her. Sara responded by sending him several warning messages, because they had been warning[2] each other as a fun prank for the last several days. But this was not a fun prank.

 “What are you doing???” Poopdeck McGee “IMed.” “The world is ending outside my window right now!”

 “??? >:-(” Sara, or “Cloud9        1,” responded.

“Turn on the news RIGHT NOW,” Poopdeck McGee said, then turned on his “away message."[3]

 And so it was that Sara learned two planes had hit the World Trade Center because Poopdeck McGee told her to turn on the television.

 At this point, Matt had left the retrospectively probably racist man’s house and was watching TV in a friend’s apartment across the hall. Sara joined him.

 They stared in horror as CNN showed innocent men and women jumping out of windows, preferring a swift death by falling over a thousand feet to the searing heat and inevitable asphyxiation that lay within. Some were holding hands. As Matt and Sara wondered how many people were in the towers at the time (the news report said tens of thousands of people worked at the World Trade Center on any given weekday) and how many of them were the parents of their own classmates, the south tower fell. One of the tallest buildings in the world, and it was gone. A half hour later, the scene repeated itself as the north tower followed its sister’s path of tragic destruction. The New York City skyline as Matt and Sara knew it had changed.

 ...

 Five days later, Matt and Sara sat in their High Rise apartment, struggling with the moral dilemma that would define the comedy world of the early 2000s. Late night talk show stages had gone dark. SNL would not be live that Saturday night. Could they, just days after the tragic, world-changing events of 9/11, attempt to write a comedy page?[4]

 “Matt, should we not do an issue of the Ampersand this week?” Sara asked. “Can -- can anything be funny ever again?”

 “Yeah, why wouldn’t we?”

 “Oh sure, ok, you’re right.”

 And so it was that Matt and Sara made the bravest of all decisions: choosing to write, edit and lay out a full page of myopic, Wesleyan-centric attempted humor as the rest of the nation mourned. The NFL cancelled games. Clear Channel banned dozens of songs that might serve as triggers for listeners. Lorne Michaels, Jon Stewart, and Jay Leno sat paralyzed, unsure if America would ever -- could ever -- laugh again. Matt and Sara, however, pressed ahead.

Many heroes emerged out of the tragedy of 9/11: firemen, civilian volunteers, Rudy Giuliani for some still-unclear reason. But did any of these people show the strength, perseverance, or All-American lack of situational awareness that Matt and Sara did?  They did not. Put another way, when you think about it, weren’t Matt and Sara the real first responders? They were.

        [1] Before the advent of Web 2.0, it was common for young people to engage in online communication via pseudonymous avatars. Few people used their actual names, as is the case in contemporary platforms such as Google Chat or Facebook. It was an extremely inefficient and oddly anxiety-inducing system, as one had to pick a permanent name out of an increasingly diminished set of options, none of which were likely to still reflect one’s personality even a few months later. For example, one may have selected in 8th grade the pseudonym through which one was conducting a sort of suspiciously close relationship with one’s boyfriend’s friend at NYU.

 [2] AOL, briefly in 2001, introduced a self-reporting, computerized spam-filtering system through  which anyone could report anyone else for inappropriate content. It would simply count the number of warnings and reduce a user’s ability to send messages in accordance. The result was likely a slight reduction in illicit online behavior and a massive increase in weirdly flirting with your boyfriend’s friend at NYU.

 [3] “Away Messages” were similar to the green, yellow and red status system currently used by GChat. One could and, if one was a college student at a pretentious liberal art school, one was essentially required to post something funny, ironic or cryptic as their away auto-response. A clear and functional statement, such “I am currently unavailable,” suggested one was uninteresting and unworthy of the attention of one’s friend’s girlfriend with whom one was, of course, only being friendly.