9/11, what did you do that day? How did you find out?

In My Humble Opinion
1

I had my sisters dog at my place as she was at work. The dog decided to chew off my CAT5 cable. This pissed me off as I the day before got 10/10 Fiber installed and activated. Desperate to enjoy the broadband I manually connected the wires and got it working again.

Thank god I did because a bit later some eastern european friend of mine told me that the WTC towers were burning in NYC. I instantly turned on the tv and saw the images.

The Swedish news websites got heavy traffic so they stripped the sites into only one headline. That hasn’t happened since that day.

This being around 2-3PM I started calling and alerting friends of what was going on. Everyone were baffled.

What unravelled was probably one of the most extreme days of my life, Live on TV.

What did you do that day and how did you find out?

2

Moved to IMHO from GQ.

3

It was a weird time for me. My husband had lost his job, which was very unfortunate since we had two small kids and I’d just found out I was pregnant. We had to move out of our comfortable home and back in with my parents… awkward! My husband had just flown off to Tucson to interview for a new job, while I stayed at my folk’s house with the kids. It was morning and my 4 year old wanted to watch Barney, so I turned on the TV just in time to watch live as the second plane smashed into the twin towers.
By the way, my husband was stuck in Tucson for longer than expected since the planes weren’t flying, and the extra-long stay let him bond more with the potential employers. He got the job, and we’ve lived here in Tucson pretty happily ever since.

4

It was my freshman year of college. I woke up early, laid in bed for a while, relishing that the room was cool and my sheets were soft. Then I got up and headed over to the adjacent building to pick up breakfast from the dorm cafeteria.

As I was going through the checkout, I noticed that the two cafeteria ladies were talking about the Oklahoma City bombing. But I was still in an early morning fugue, so I didn’t really notice. They swiped my card, and I went to the toaster to toast my everything bagel.

As the bagel was toasting, a girl walked into the cafeteria; I sort of idly watched her without listening. She was listening to something that the cafeteria ladies were saying. Her eyes were getting wider, and wider. . .

So I started listening, and then I dashed back to my dorm room to pull up CNN. It didn’t work, so I came here. The ongoing thread said that robots.cnn.com was working, so I went there. I IMd my friend Drags; I didn’t get him, but his roommate saw my messages and freaked out. Then I went to class, because. . .well, I felt like it wasn’t optional. We didn’t want to talk about class there, though.

The professor insisted on continuing the lecture. During our break–it was a two hour class–a bunch of us got news from relatives, using the phone in the hall or our ancient Nokia phones. This one girl, Amber, came back a little late, breathless, and said, “The towers just–”

“Not now,” the professor said, “we’re talking about Aristotle.”

“Yeah,” this guy Aaron said. “I’m sure the towers will stay like this–” He held out his arm, forearm at a 45 degree angle. “–until we’re done talking about Aristotle.”

The rest of the day was spent watching the news, and sort of numbly going to class. I was in Indiana–what the fuck else were we supposed to do? One of my friends lived in NYC, and got stranded on Manhattan for a few days–his school was there, but he lived in (IIRC) Queens. He ended up staying with his aunt until he could easily get home.

5

In the computer lab ditching a class (college student). They evacuated the campus about 10ish. (Campus adjacent to natural gas tank).

6

I don’t remember,

7

I had been working very late the previous night, so I slept in. My mother, who had been living with me, yelled from downstairs, for me to come down and see what’s on tv. I wondered what was on tv that could possibly be that important, so took my time coming down . . . just in time to see the second plane hit.

8

I woke up, switched on TV and saw it on the news. It had been going on for a while by the time I found out.

9

It all happened late in the evening, Sydney time, of 11 September so I had already gone to bed. I didn’t find out until the next morning, Wednesday 12 September. While I was having breakfast I turned the radio on, as usual, to get the news.

10

I found out when I got into work, and the secretary told me that a plane had hit the World Trade Center. We didn’t have a TV in the office, but somebody had a radio, so we’d pop in and out of her office.

11

I was living in Montana, riding the county’s school bus. A pair of girls in the seat ahead of me were talking about a plane that had hit a tower, and I assumed that she had meant a crop-sprayer had crashed into one of the old grain silos we have in the area, which shocked me. It wasn’t until the bus arrived at school and all of the students (roughly forty of us, ranging from 1st grade to 9th grade) were ushered into the computer room to watch the disaster as it was unfolding.

Ostensibly, our classes for the day were cancelled, and most of the teachers milled around the office or their classrooms, discussing the possibility of a wide-spread attack against the United States, of which the hijacked planes were only the beginning.

The teachers had taken folding chairs and lined them up in front of a television, one of two we had in the entire school, and assembled the faculty and students alike, some sixty people, to watch the entire thing. Most of the teachers left after thirty minutes, to talk among themselves, out of earshot of the students. Gradually, the students began leaving too, returning to their rooms to do homework or read or whatever.

I sat there watching television for, I’d estimate, around four hours. I was the last person in the room. All of the students had left. Some of them had been picked up by their parents, or had gone to class, where they sat reading their textbooks or talking in groups. Finally, a teacher came into the room and flipped the television off and told me to return to my homeroom.

At what point did I realize the gravity of the situation, I don’t know. I was too young at the time to understand what was happening. I knew it was significant, but it wasn’t until the next morning, when the local newspaper ran the headline “AMERICA UNDER ATTACK!” in enormous, bold, black type on the frontpage that I knew something terrible was happening.

12

I found out during choir rehearsal. I was in the elite choir at high school, the Chamber Singers. My choir director normally doesn’t take calls during rehearsals. But the phone would not stop ringing. He went to answer it, and was gone a long time. Then he came back, and gave a formal announcement of what was going on. Then we rolled out the TV cart and watched. The TV was on in most of the rest of my classes. If the room didn’t have a TV, we were discussing it.

The only other thing I remember about it was reassuring people that our little podunk town was unlikely to be a terrorist target, and how no one talked between classes at all. Not a smile in site anywhere, we all went to class with our heads hanging low. And, for the first time in forever, I believe everyone stood up and did the whole pledge of allegiance thing.

13

My father woke me by pounding on my bedroom door around 7 am and told me that the country was under attack. I remember feeling panicked and I rushed out of my room without putting on my clothes. I thought maybe it was the Russians or the Chinese that were attacking. I was relieved when my dad told me that it was just planes crashing into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I thought that the nukes were flying. I went back into my bedroom to get dressed and came out again to watch the news. I saw the second tower collapse a little while after that. I heard the local university had cancelled classes, so I figured that my community college would too (they didn’t), so I didn’t go to class, I just sat around the house and watched the news all day.

14

I was flipping through channels and I saw one of the towers buring, I think it was BBC World. I thought it was perhaps a bit about the 1993 bombing (the trial was starting about then IIRC) and then I noticed that it was live.

15

I was living in Manhattan at the time, in a studio apartment in the Upper East Side. The first plane hit when I was in the shower and the second while I was on the subway, so I first heard of what happened was walking west on 22nd St. A man walking next to me on the sidewalk, wearing a UPS uniform and dreadlocks, met my eyes - a complete stranger! On a New York City street! - and said, in a sad, serious tone:

“The World Trade Center, mon.”

I did what anyone would do under the circumstances: broke eye contact, nodded, and started walking faster. I only though about what he actually said a few minutes later, after I arrived at the ad agency, when Danny from Traffic nodded good morning and said:

“Yo, Josh - you hear? A couple of planes hit the Twin Towers.”

“Really?” I said, thinking that he was talking about a couple of Pipers.

“Yeah! Go take a look.”

I stopped to turn on my computer, them sauntered over to a south-facing office to see what was going on. My first though was, Well, those weren’t fucking Pipers.

The rest of the morning went by very fast.

16

I got to 1st period in the morning and it was on TV in the classroom, sometime after the second plane hat hit. There was no roll call or anything of that nature, and we all watched until sometime after both towers had fallen. We said the pledge of allegiance and school was let out early.

Later that day we went grocery shopping and then I went to work my evening shift at the fast food place I was working for at the time. We had almost no business the entire night. I had rolled tacos with guacamole for dinner.

17

It was surreal. We were on holiday in Majorca and had just got back to the apartment and were having lunch.

I flipped on Sky News and was astonished to hear them reporting that a plane had hit the Pentagon. That coverage went on for some time and we were both open mouthed. We immediately though “terrorism” and I told my wife about a very similar plot from a Tom Clancy novel that I’d read a while back.

Then after about five minutes…and I will always remember that lifting feeling in my stomach, they cut back to the studio and said something along the lines of “…and this comes immediately in the aftermath of two planes hitting the Twin Towers in New York”…WHAT?

They had not mentioned that *at all *and we were gobsmacked when they cut to those pictures. So that pretty much glued us into place for the next few hours. The coverage was thorough but confused and that just added to the sense of dislocation we felt.

At one point the anchor was talking fairly soberly for a few minutes whilst in the background the live location shot was a single burning tower and a substantial column of spreading dust. No-one on the TV seemed to notice this and for a good minute or so I was murmuring variations on the theme of “it’s collapsed…how can you not notice?”

so very, very weird. Very much the JFK/911 moment for my generation (along with the CNN coverage of Gulf War I)

Needless to say we lost our appetite and lunch went mostly uneaten.

18

Fortunately, I happened to be out of town for new hire training for a job I had started that monday.

Unfortunately the job was located at 2 World Financial Center, New York, NY.

19

It started like any other day. I noticed the traffic was light as I pulled out of my drive way. Didn’t think too much of it. I still smoked back then. So I stopped for cigarettes.

It felt weird in the store. Less people than normal. Quiet. There was no talking and I couldn’t figure out what was wrong. I think the clerk said something about a bomb going off somewhere.

The rest of my drive is a blur. I remember getting to work and asking that a TV be brought out to our office. The General Manager jokingly refused. I threatened to go home, so he relented.

We watched all day. I watched nothing but MSNBC for months. I always have delayed reactions to things like this. Three months after the fact, I cried off and on for 6 months. I’m tearing up now.

It still pisses me off too. What a stupid fucking waste.

I can’t bring myself to watch any of the anniversary shows they are airing.

20

At the time I worked next to the US consulate in Toronto. I drove in with my friend into downtown. It was a sunny fall day and I was walking towards the Reuters giant screen outside of and office tower. There were a lot of people watching the live event and I saw the second tower hit on that sidewalk. Then I made my way to work and our building was evacuated and we were told to go home. So i called my friend and we drove back to our suburb and watched the rest of the on tv. I was shocked standing in in front of Reuters watching this live.