Though former IBM exec Bill Ellmore’s colleague may have saved his life, stopping him from boarding United Flight 93 on September 11, 2001, her heroic decision wasn’t enough to save her job, the tech mogul admitting to giving her the ax in an unhinged social media thread.


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Ellmore, who worked for the tech giant between 1997 and 2019, per his LinkedIn page, headed to Twitter on Monday with the harrowing tale of how he narrowly escaped a fiery fate on 9/11 after his co-worker implored him to take another cross-country flight.



“I was booked on United Flight 93 on 9/11, 2001, flying nonstop from Newark NJ to San Francisco CA. Around midnight the night before, a coworker called me urging me to change my flight to fly into San Jose instead,” he recalled.


Though Ellmore cited timetables as the reason behind this switch — ”she took the same flight on 9/10 and the commute from San Francisco to Mountain View would make me late for my meeting,” he later explained — he was still frustrated with losing his first-class seat and connecting through Denver, Colorado. But even with this laundry list of gripes, he ultimately heeded his employee’s advice, a decision that spared his life.


“I was very reluctant but I did it,” he said, noting that he watched in envy as passengers boarded the doomed airplane, which would later crash into a field in Somerset County, Pennsylvania.


“I was upset that I was not leaving earlier, in my 1st class seat on a direct flight. I didn’t notice or care about the people as they were boarding, only myself,” Ellmore continued.


This bitterness, however, didn’t last long.


“When I finally boarded my plane, we were 7 planes behind flight 93,” he remembered. “The pilot told us to look out the right side of the plane because it appeared the Twin Towers had been hit by a plane.”


While he initially “thought it might have been a small Cessna,” seeing the second plane hit the New York City landmark helped him grasp the gravity of the situation.


“I changed that day,” he wrote. "I never hesitate to give up my seat for a later flight if requested.”


As his tale began making the rounds on social media, several readers wondered what happened to the colleague in question, the answer to which cast a sour tone on this otherwise saccharine story.



Though he later elaborated that the firing happened “months later” — “she was ultimately the reason I was booked on 93 to begin with because she wasn’t doing her job well,” he said, unnecessarily adding that “God saved a man by using a donkey before” — the people of Twitter were naturally peeved.



“Imagine firing your guardian angel for poor work performance,” added @ExaminerMo, while @kaitave_ avowed to “invent a time machine just so I can go back and tell this woman not to bother changing your flight.”


So take it from Ellmore if God wanted you dead, or fired, he'd find a way.