On this day in 1999, there was a little bitty protest by a handful of people in downtown Seattle.

I have a few stories of my brush with WTO, thanks to my workplace of that time being at 6th and Stewart. Here is one:

I worked for a dotcom at the time as an HTML jockey. I had heard the rumors on the Internet — a movement to create civil disobedience on a scale larger than the J29 protests — and I knew that ground zero was going to be Westlake, two blocks or so from the office. So, I e-mailed the leadership of the dotcom, told them what I knew, and implored them to shut the office for one day — November 30. The response was that no, the office was going to be open, and I could always take paid time off if I didn’t think it was safe, but of course it was going to be safe and nothing was going to happen.

The weekend before, we went to Ikea to buy some new bookshelves. Of course, there was no way they were going to fit in my subcompact, so hey, why don’t you deliver them… on November 30?

Was it all planned? Absolutely. But the idea was that the bookshelves would arrive in the morning, and I could still work a full day, so I wouldn’t take paid time off.

By the time the bookshelves arrived, downtown was utter chaos, the buses weren’t running, and the tear gas was in the air. It was chaos at work as well. From what I heard, some of the same senior staff I e-mailed about the threat, the ones that poo-pooed by worries, were stuck overnight in the building lockdown.

You remember the video of the rioters looting that Starbucks? That was in the building I was in. There were also a number of consulates in there as well. To protect the consulate offices, the building management locked EVERY door out of the building, including the garage. There was no way out.

And oh, I never actually had to take a vacation day. No one ever made me do it.

Is there a lesson in all of this? Probably. But I just like the fact that the stuffy business suits were sleeping in their corner offices while I was at home watching the chaos on TV.

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