Joe Bergmann still isn’t sure why he didn’t get off the train at the World Trade Center the morning of Sept. 11, 2001.
The basement station was his usual stop, from which he walked across the street to his building where he worked, at 130 Liberty Street. But on that morning, when the train doors opened, he stayed put.
That train turned out to be the last one in, and the last one out before before the first hijacked plane hit the West Tower of the World Trade Center. When Bergmann exited the train at the next stop, he immediately knew his life would never be the same.
“I saw there was a big, gaping hole in the West Tower,” he recalls.
Bergmann called his wife, Kimberly, and described the horror firsthand. It would be 3:30 a.m. before he finally reached his home on Long Island.
“We pretty much decided right then, we’re moving,” Bergmann says. “We put the house up for sale and started putting out resumes.”
When Bergmann was offered a job in March of 2002 with a company in Huntersville, he jumped at the chance to move his family. They found a house in Huntersville’s Wynfield Forest, and everything seemed to be falling into place.
“Then, as we walked out of the closing on the house, I got a call from the recruiter saying the (job) offer fell through,” Bergmann recalls.
Fortunately, another offer came through, this one in the mortgage division at Wachovia. But for a native New Yorker, Huntersville offered a bit of a culture shock.
“When we were looking at houses, we’re driving through Wynfield Forest, and everybody is waving at us,” Bergmann says with a laugh. “I’m thinking, ‘Why the heck are all these people waving at us? They never do that in New York.’”
But they do it here, and Bergmann likes it, along with the gentler winters. So do Kimberly and their two children, Kaytlyn, 10, and Brandon, 5.
As Wachovia transitions to Wells Fargo and the financial industry continues its unsteady emergence from mortgage hell, jobs like Bergmann’s are about as certain as a major bank’s stock price. So, when he saw the opportunity to go into business for himself, Bergmann took the plunge, even if the whole thing pretty much happened by accident.
“I saw a Geek Squad car out in front of my neighbor’s house,” Bergmann explains. “And when my neighbor came out, he was really angry.”
The neighbor had shelled out close to $400, and his computer was still on the blink, so the neighborly Bergmann offered to take a look.
“It was an easy fix,” he says. “It only took a few minutes.”
And with that, Bergmann booted up Tech-EEZ, his own computer repair and training company. He says his ideal client is someone who doesn’t know a whole lot about technology, gets a virus on a computer and doesn’t know what to do. Bergmann can fix the virus damage, he says, then help the user better understand how to use the computer and its software.
And when he drives away, folks are likely to wave.
