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And even some people who had been there have a hard time grasping the scale of it all, and the damgage that was done.

In August of 2001, I went to a convention at the World Trade Center Marriott. I lived in the city, so I took the train down, but most of the attendees were from out of town and stayed at either that hotel, or at the World Financial Center Marriott down the street.

At some point during the evening of 9/11, I thought to check in with the email group for that convention, since I'd ended up meeting several of them. On the website, I saw a lot of messages like "I wonder if the Marriot is still standing" and "gee, I hope so" and I thought, are they kidding? They were all right there for an entire weekend not three weeks ago, did they NOT notice how close the hotel was to both towers?

So I typed a response to the effect of Sorry, there is absolutely NO chance that the Marriott survived, it was too close, in all likelihood it's been squashed flat (turns out I was pretty accurate), and if you're going to hope for anything, just hope that the staff and guests got out before the building was destroyed (unfortunately not all of them did).

One person replied "But it looked like the towers fell straight down", and I responded "Yes, they did fall straight down, straight down on top of the hotel and every other building around them, and they weren't made out of feathers", and some other person chimed in with "well, I know it's a slim chance, but it looked like all that stuff was just billowing down in a cascade, isn't it possible that it could all just pile up in the spaces between the buildings, and the buildings themselves will be in fairly good shape when it's all cleared away?" At that point, #7 had already come down, the local news was saying two or three others appeared likely to do the same, and I gave up trying to explain why they shouldn't go ahead and reserve the Marriott for the next year.

I gave up on the group altogether in October of that year, when it turned out that quite a few of them were (much to my surprise) peaceniks who didn't want us to do anything militarily in response. Life's too short to slum with some folks, even if you share other common interests...

"well, I know it's a slim chance, but it looked like all that stuff was just billowing down in a cascade, isn't it possible that it could all just pile up in the spaces between the buildings, and the buildings themselves will be in fairly good shape when it's all cleared away?"

LOL ... If my memory serves...wasn't the hotel actually connected to the south tower? I can only recall ever entering the place through WTC lobby. If so that would mean that there was no space between the buildings.

You're better off without dealing with that kind of nonsense. Good story though.