Saturday morning while I was waking up to go to work, the space shuttleColumbia was disintegrating over Texas.

Shuttle parts fell to earth while I was in the in shower, business asusual.I listened to the radio. A Saturday replay of the “Armstrong & Getty Show”was on. KSTE replayed the show where A&G interviewed a Raelian cult memberwhose cult claims to have cloned a human. On the replay, the pairdiscussed the out of control Oakland Raider fans who rioted in Oaklandafter the Super Bowl. Business as usual.

Driving from my home in El Dorado Hills about an hour and a half after theshuttle incident, I kept listening to the A&G replays from the previousweek. The radio station didn’t have advertising to fill between breaktimes, so they ran long house ads. Nobody broke into the “best of” show tobring information about the shuttle.

I got to the bookstore, where I work, at 8. My boss came up and unlockedthe door for me. We said good morning, and I started my workday. Businessas usual.

Half an hour later, some co-workers showed up, and we greeted each other. At 9, we opened our doors.

Another co-worker came in. My boss was at the front counter with me, andthe co-worker asked if we knew about the shuttle. My boss said she watchedit on the news before she came in, and I asked my co-worker what happened.

That was the first I heard of it.

Until then, everything was business as usual.

I was assigned to the registers the first hour. The first hour isn’tusually a busy hour, but there is traffic at the registers. Not a word wassaid by the customers about the incident.

At that time in the morning, people usually show up to buy newspapers -mostly Barron’s, a weekly financial newspaper. One guy purchased 18 copies of Barron’s because he was mentioned in it andwanted to know if anyplace else in town sold the paper so he could getmore copies about himself.

Not a word was mentioned about the events of the day.

Some of us were working in the back at around 11. We turned the radio onand tuned it to National Public Radio. It was the first I heard of theshuttle explosion from a media outlet. President Bush made a statement tothe nation. One of my co-workers made a joke about Bush.

Regardless of the catastrophe, it was business as usual.

The host of the NPR program, whose name I don’t remember, coldly statedthe facts of the disaster, and said the astronauts “expired.” Not “died,”not “perished,” not “killed.” They “expired,” like they had outlived theirshelf life, and were discarded. The language of journalism, in search of objectivity, can be sterilesometimes.

Have to keep things business as usual.

NPR was running a pledge drive. They halted it to cover the breaking newsevents, but the on-air personalities made it clear that people could stillcall the toll free numbers and donate money. They gave out the numbersbetween accounts of the Columbia explosion.

I lost a lot of respect for NPR Saturday, and they should be ashamed forconducting business as usual.

Back out on the sales floor, it got very busy. Kids, twenty- andthirty-somethings, middle aged people, senior citizens – they were allthere. They all needed to get their entertainment fix.

The store staff was outnumbered and overmatched by their demand for quickservice.We sold books, CDs and DVDs like they were going out of style, and all thewhile not a word was said about the national tragedy by the staff or thecustomers.

As I left the building for lunch and later after work, the parking lot waspacked with cars, just like always. Business as usual.

I had to stop over at my parents’ house after work. Not a word wasmentioned about the shuttle, even though CNN was on the television,broadcasting video after video of the Columbia breaking into a daytimefireworks display over Texas.

I remember Jan. 28, 1986. I remember right where I was and what I wasdoing when I heard the Challenger exploded after takeoff.

It was different then.

It was like people who remember where they were when Kennedy wasassassinated. The room I was in went silent and everybody wasstunned as we realized the unthinkable happened.

The world seemed to stop for a while. Dan Rather teared up on televisionduring his broadcast. He didn’t do that again until he went on Lettermanafter Sept. 11 when the next big thing happened.

Saturday, the unthinkable happened again, but this time nobody seemed tonotice, and the day was business as usual.