I worked at an Urgent Care at the time, and had the day off. I didn’t turn on the news when I got up, I got my 3 year-old (at the time) up, dressed, fed, and off to daycare. I went over to my good friend and next-door neighbor’s first and asked her if she wanted to ride with me. She came along. I did attempt to listen to the radio in the car, but all anybody was doing was talking, so I turned it off.
Take the baby into daycare, and everyone’s freaking out in the office. They tell me that the White House has been attacked, planes are crashing everywhere, we’re at war, we’re all gonna die!
I leave there and get back in the car. Turn to my neighbor and ask her if she’d heard what’s going on. She’s like, “Oh, yeah, I saw it happen at 6 o’clock this morning.” Then I asked that, in the future, if something like this happens and I don’t know about it, maybe she could fill me in?
What were you doing?
I was asleep. My dad came into my room in his underwear and told me that two planes had hit the world trade centers (at the time I wasn’t even sure what those were - I live in Nevada, for Christ’s sake!) and they thought it was deliberate. I was half-asleep so I made some comment about how I wasn’t good at turning back time, what’d he want me to do about it?
He came in a while later and was like “They got the Pentagon, too.” THAT woke me up. I was in ROTC at the time and fully aware of the security at a place like the Pentagon. The entire day was off. My bitch of an Algebra teacher gave us a test that day, which we all failed horribly.
Well technically 11 September is my birthday (happy birthday, me) but the attacks happened on 11 September US time so it was the morning after NZ time. I remember lying in bed listening to the radio and thinking “That can’t be right”. Turned over to my husband, he was thinking exactly the same thing but decided to go downstairs and turn on the telly. Then called out “I think you’d better come and see for yourself”
Asleep. (See, this is why I’ve stopped telling people “my September 11” story in the last few years; it’s in no way interesting.) But I was asleep at the time, since I didn’t have to go back to college for another week, and I woke up at 9:32 when my alarm went off. I heard Don Imus talking about planes hitting the Twin Towers, figured it was probably an accident but immediately got up to check out the TV. And you can guess how things went from there.
I was in college, and wasn’t aware when the first plane hit, because I was in the shower. But once I was out of the shower, and getting dressed, I decided to turn on the tv, in search of something totally stupid and distracting. See, I was in the mood for light, idiotic fare, because I was simultaneously getting dressed and packing my overnight bag so I could go home that night, to attend my grandmother’s funeral the next day. She had just died on Sept. 8, and I was really in sort of a daze and very bummed out, and just wanted to be distracted.
Three minutes later, I watched the second plane hit the south tower, live on camera, all the time saying “this has to be a joke…why are they doing this? This isn’t funny, they have to stop…”
I was at home in Spain, playing a MUD (slothmud). Myself and other non-US players relayed to the US players what our TVs and radios were saying. Several people from the NY area came in for a moment and gave to other US players the phone numbers of their moms and moms of coworkers to call them up and tell them their sons and daughters were ok.
It was 4 PM-ish here. I was – with most of the rest of the company I was with at the time – at the birthday celebration of our QA manager (She was exactly 30 that day).
Then one of the few people who couldn’t be there stromed into the room and shouted “A plane has hit the WTC in NY!!”
Celebration OFF… television ON… We got to see the second collision live…
I was in the middle of what looked like becoming a deep and meaningful conversation with my Dad - such things are rare between us (and much valued on my part), so when my brother came into the room to ask if we’d heard the news, I was mightly annoyed at the interruption - for about 20 seconds…
I was half asleep in a music theory class in college. We were analyzing Mozart’s variations on the “Twinkle Twinkle Little Star” theme, of all things. Towards the end of the class, a secretary hurried into class and announced that a plane had hit the WTC. “Big deal,” I thought, assuming a helicopter had grazed the building, and not quite sure anyways what the World Trade Center was (it sounded like a government building). Trudged across campus, and paused by an empty security vehicle that had the window rolled down and the radio turned on: heard frantic voices on the radio, and got the idea that maybe this was worse than I had thought. Continued walking across campus to the shuttle bus to go to my next class. Got on the bus, and started hearing rumors that other planes may have gone down. The bus driver turned the radio on and we heard about the Pentagon and another plane, and there were worries that still more planes were going to hit.
For that brief bus ride, it really felt like anything could happen. We didn’t know when it was going to stop – how many more planes would there be? Dozens? Hundreds? Would there be bombings as well? Nobody knew.
I was just getting ready to go to school. It was one of my first few days in Junior High. My mom decided to keep me home for a little bit, even though there was no chance whatsoever that Einstein Middle School was going to be bombed. We were so shocked, but we had no idea that it would be the pivotal event that would dictate US politics for the next five years (and many to come).
Eventually, she realized there was no danger, and she took me to school for 4th period.
I had slept in my office at the Poolhall that I owned at the time, got up and started to walk home(about two miles away).Passed several people on the way,nothing seemed out of place or unusual,stopped in the bank to make a deposit and heard on the radio that they had closed the Space Needle in Seattle,I asked the ditz of a teller working what happened and she said rather matter-of-factly that"a plane had hit a building" I just assumed from her uninterest in the matter that a plane had crashed in Seattle.I continued you on my way got near the house when a student stopped me and asked "what I thought of all this"course I said “what?”. He explained what had happened.When I got home I pulled out my radio took it outside and spent the rest of the day painting a fence and listening to the news.
Working in a casino cage in Vegas, nightshift. My offsider had gone home at 4am. I was getting ready to go, counting up, when I got a call to have them turn on the TV at the bar to CNN.
Watched the second tower hit before I left, and heard about the Pentagon hit on the way home. All over the radio they kept reminding us how close to Hoover Dam we were, and what a horrible thing it would be for us if it was hit.
I was reading the dope with CNN on in the background. I was staying up all night fooling around as I was wont to do at the time. The first I heard about it was here.
At school. I had gotten there early, and decided to meander into the bookstore to see what insane prices they were charging for my books that semester, walked past the TV showing “New flash - plane hits WTC”, figure it was an accident, get to the stairs to get to the textbook section, realise it’s PACKED, double back past the TV, glance up, and WHAM! Plane 2 information. Stuck around, started to see the footage and the rumours, lasted maybe 40 minutes and then wandered off to a class and spent the rest of the day discussing what was going on and whether we were in any danger (being within 45 mins of Toronto, we figured it was a top Canadian target, but I was pretty sure things were going to be limited to the US). It was a tense day.
My nephew (the one who wondered why there was no EBS) tells me he was thinking the same thing. And also that Vegas itself might get bombed, because it’s so much a symbol of Western depravity.
