Good Riddance Osama

On the 11th September 2001 I remember that I was working in Denning House at 90 Chancery Lane in London. I was working at Andersen Consulting in the Tech Architecture team at that time. A colleague and friend, Harvinder Rao, a Sikh (who was actually a qualified doctor who had decided to reconvert to consulting), was monitoring his stock portfolio on Yahoo that morning. He became quite alarmed as the bottom fell out of the market without any warning or explanation. That precipitated a mass move of 90 or so consultants into a small basement pub next door where we started to watch the fall out of the horrific events of that day. Just under 10 years on, and the day after I blogged about the loss of my friend Cathy to a terrorist attack in Marrakech last week, I woke up this morning to the news of the death of Osama Bin Laden. The obvious question of if the killing had taken place a week earlier could Cathy’s death have been avoided, sprang to my mind. Clearly a useless and forlorn question which couldn’t change the reality of the situation, but it just goes to show how difficult it is to reconcile certain things in one’s mind at times. Many people cheered the death of Bin Laden today. I didn’t, I just regretted the loss of Cathy even more.