I had slept in and emailed my husband gm when I got up. I remember writing something about it being “just another Tuesday—but that was a good thing.” He emailed back, “Have you seen the news?”
Unfortunately I contracted ARDS a couple weeks later and was in a drug-induced coma for about a month (on life support etc.) Among my hallucinations were the Twin Towers collapsing over and over again, like in a loop. I had panic attacks for months afterward. I “feel” the horror of 9/11 connected to my “waking up (?)” trapped in a coffin, fighting for my life but I didn’t know why. It’s still a tangled mess for me.
The ONE day I decided NOT to watch the morning news. Heard about it on NPR on my way to work.
Umm… I don’t know if you know this, but you were supposed to NEVER FORGET. I seem to recall a memo of some kind…
In college, living with a friend, getting ready for school and for some reason I decided to turn on the TV. It wasn’t something I often did in the morning unless I was having one of those “One more cigarette and then I’ll just drive a little faster” type days. I wasn’t even particularly paying attention, I believe I had GMA on. They cut away to the first tower with the gaping hole in the side, talking to people. Half of them said it was a plane, the others said it was too big to be a plane, it must have been a missile. When the second tower was hit (which I saw happen live), I called the school to see what was going on and was told that all classes after 12 were canceled. I called work (family business) to let them know what was going on since they didn’t have an internet connection and likely weren’t paying enough attention to the little radio to have noticed it.
IIRC, I went to my first class and made it back home to see the towers collapse, or maybe I just skipped my class, I don’t remember that part, but I know I saw everything happen.
I was in motherfreaking math class. Learning…4th grade math, whatever that was.
The 4th grade wasn’t even told about what happened by our teachers, but I heard later some kindergartners were. So strange.
I didn’t even realize something was up until I walked home later that day. The kind old cross guard lady was being friendly and was talking to one of the boys crossing at the same time I was.
The boy said “Today’s my birthday…”
The cross guard shook her head and said “What a day to have a birthday. I hope it gets happier.”
I remember asking my mom and dad “Why?” and crying later, when I found out the details.
And it still doesn’t make sense.
I was driving to work listening to the news when the first plane hit. I seem to remember they delayed the next program to keep the news on the air, just in case it was something important. I sat in the car for about 5 minutes listening.
Got into work - my boss tried to hold meetings and do normal stuff..because that’s how he copes. The rest of us wanted to follow the news, so we did.
Back then, I coached JV volleyball at a local school in the afternoons. So I left my day job and went to see my team. I knew they would have discussed stuff all day at school, but still started practice with a chat..often, the coach/player relationship can be stronger than the teacher/student one.
The father of one of my girls was a pilot..but he was safe. Stuck out of town for a few days, though. I had to answer questions like “Are we safe?” “Is there going to be a war?” After about 10 or 15 minutes, we got around to practice.
That evening, I went out to dinner with the girl I was seeing at the time..we had both watched enough news, and were ready to get away. I remember motorcycles driving down Las Olas Blvd blaring the Star Spangled Banner, waving flags.
A good friend of mine worked at a big 5 accounting firm, and often was in the World Financial Center. I couldn’t get a hold of him for hours..very scary. Happily, he was on a business trip to California, and was safe.
-D/a
Back story. Over the previous weekend, my only TV had stopped working and I called a repair shop on Monday, Sept. 10 and they picked it up on Monday afternoon and didn’t return it till Wednesday afternoon. I had had high speed internet for less than a year and was not accustomed to looking on for news (still don’t much in fact).
Tuesday morning dawned bright and sunny that day in Montreal (just like NY, in fact) and my wife and I had breakfast and tuned, as we used to do in those days to CBC-FM. Around 9:30 we got in the car and went off to the supermarket. We did our week’s shopping and got back before 10:30. CBC, in all its wisdom, was still broadcasting its classical music (request) show, so the first we heard about anything was on the 11 AM news. Having no TV we tuned to CBC AM and listened to their non-stop news. Around noon, I got an email from my daughter who worked in a building at 39th and 3rd in Manhattan. She was fine. She had voted in the primary (later canceled and run again at a later date) then gone to work, where she had a good of the towers. So she emailed us, but after that it was a week before we heard from her again as she had neither email nor telephone service.
She lived on the north side of 14th. To go any further south, you had to go through security.
I was working with my dad in his store. A woman came in and told us what had happened. We just both assumed she’d forgot to take her meds. Later at lunch time we turned on the radio and there was a live report of an eyewitness. It was almost more horrifying as the guy described it. When we got home around 6pm (GMT) the telly was showing the collisions non-stop. I had only been in NYC a couple of weeks earlier. Later that day I met up with friends and one guy had left NYC on September 11th. On the morning of September 10th he had ascended to the restaurant high up in one of the WTC towers for breakfast.
In college. I woke up in the morning to complete some studying for a calculus exam.
I happened to look at the internet while I was studying, but I could not get any news sites to work. I was completely baffled. I knew something big was going on, but I couldn’t figure out what. Eventually a friend told me to turn on a TV.:smack:
By the time roommate and I turned on the TV, there was only one tower. I said “there are supposed to be two towers, where did the other one go?” He was unsure. I said there is no way that will collapse, its just a fire, right? Then we watched the second tower collapse.
I looked at the clock - I had a calculus test in 20 minutes. I had no indication that I COULDN’T take it, so I packed up and went to class. The people in class were saying “We can’t take this, we are under attack!” The professor responded with “First you take your calculus test, then you can go deal with the rest of the world.”
Ours was one of the few Universities that did not close that day, so we went to classes.
It seemed a very cold thing to do, but we didn’t know what else to do. Just sitting there and watching the news for hours didn’t make you feel any better and there was nothing you could do.
I was on the Dope almost immediately – or at least I tried, the Web was jammed that day. Go figure.
I’m sure I’ve related my tale before, I only hope I don’t contradict myself in the details (my memory isn’t what it used to be).
I was living in Oakland and I had just gotten up to go to work. My roommate at the time was milling about as well and he got a phone call fro someone, I can’t remember who, and his side of the conversation went something like this:
“Hello? … What? … Holy shit! … Jack! Turn on the TeeVee!”
By the time we tuned in, the first tower had already fallen. I remember looking at the images and not being able to figure out precisely what we were seeing. I remember saying to my roomie … “what the fuck? Is there only one tower there?”
So in a state of shock, I went about going into work. While on the BART we’d heard that the second tower fell. And I say ‘we’ because it was so trippy. Everybody on the train was talking to each other, and asking questions as though we had all know each other forever.
Then I got to work. At the time I was working for the Jewish Community Federation (a charity). When I arrived there were only about 10 of us there, including the head cheese, who gave what I remembered as a well-recieved speech that included something along the lines of … “and since this may very well be a Palestinian terrorist attack, we Jews are getting the fuck out of here …” except more tactful.
So I went home and watched TeeVee for seven days straight like everyone else.
I was doing “grandma duty” that morning - ferrying my youngest granddaughter to our church school. When I stopped to pick her up my DIL was watching TV and quickly brought me up to date as to what was going on.
I took the granddaughter to her school, came home, told my husband about it, and turned on our TV. It was almost unreal, watching events unfold.
We had another granddaughter, a teenager, living with us at the time, so I told her what was going on, and that Osama Bin Laden was probably behind the event. That meant explaining to her who Osama Bin Laden was and where Afghanistan was and what that country was like. It was a quick geography plus political science lesson for us all.
I’ll never forget that morning. No one else will either. It reminded me of Pearl Harbor Day, and the day JFK was killed, earthshaking events I also remember vividly.
I was driving into work listening to local news station. They were interviewing the mayor about normal local politics stuff (Oklahoma City). Just as I pulled into the parking lot, the DJ interrupted whatever the mayor was saying and apologized, saying they had to go to another story–a plane had just hit the World Trade Center. I turned off the car at about that point. I didn’t think much of it…I assumed they were talking about some small biplane that had flown off course and accidently clipped one of the towers or something. I remember feeling sorry for the pilot who probably hadn’t survived.
I made it through the parking lot, down the street, and up the elevators (I worked downtown), to my desk, and got my computer up and running. Decided to check one of the news websites to see what had happened with that plane. The page took forever to load, and when it did all I got was a headline that TWO planes had struck the World Trade Center!!!
None of the news websites would load, but I could get on here. (I lurked a LONG time before joining.) So I followed the ongoing thread here all day, getting most of the news and updates that way, in large part from foreign dopers who were able to access more websites than we were. They brought a TV into the conference room, so I did see the Towers fall live. A lot of people went home–after all, we were in the second tallest tower in downtown OKC…understandable that people would be nervous. I stayed at work, which I now regret, but I remember thinking it would be depressing and unproductive to just sit home and watch TV all day. So instead I sat at my desk, getting no work done, reading the Dope all day.
I remember at one point, before the Towers fell, I called my boyfriend (now husband) to wake him up. I knew he’d want to watch–he was a native New Yorker. I told him to turn on his TV, and he asked, “Which channel?” I said, “Doesn’t matter. Any of them. All of them.”
That was such a weird, horrible, scary day. I know I’ll be telling my grandkids about it.
I was in 6th grade English class. Class was just starting, so this was just after 10 AM (eastern). Another teacher came over and talked to our teacher in the hall for a few minutes. Then our teacher came in and explained to us what happened. I didn’t really feel any sadness or shock at the moment. Iunno. But I knew something important was going on. We watched TV for a little bit but then the Principal said that we should not watch the news but do classes as normal instead.
I was at work in the top floor of a 40-story office building about 10 blocks South of the Towers, with a beautiful panoramic view North. The second plane appeared to many of us as if it would hit our building as it flew by northward toward its destination.
I was walking on the FDR drive going North with a group of co-workers when we decided to see if we could find some other friends, and had turned West toward the Towers just as the second one fell. We continued North instead and found a bar somewhere around Houston Street where we stopped for a while to rest and watch the news. Then we walked to around 8th St in the Village before we found a bus going to Penn Station, where we each managed to find transportation home.
I had just moved to Michigan. I was on the phone with the owner of a dog training place talking about classes for my puppy. He had a TV in his office and hung up abruptly, saying that a plane had just flown into a building in NYC.
I assumed he meant a small, private plane and wondered why he was so distressed. Then I turned on the TV, and along with millions of other people stayed parked in front of the television for hours.
I was at work when a co-worker said he heard on the radio that a plane flew into the World Trade Center. I live right across the river from there and I thought how the hell could that happen when the weather was so nice? I could see a plume of smoke drifting north, but I figured they’d get it under control soon. Then my co-worker said a second plane hit the other tower and I knew it was bad. We went outside to get a better view and all we could see was smoke. They turned on the TV in the conference room and we watched CNN. I went to the ladies room and had a good cry. They let us go home soon after the towers collapsed.
Earlier that morning I was on the highway after I dropped my son off at school and I was thinking how beautiful the towers looked in the sunshine. I still miss them.
I was watching Charlie Gibson announce the news that a plane had hit the first tower when the second plane hit. We were all in just stunned silence. I think I was on CNN and the Dope for the next three months. Awful awful time.
My brother worked with the pilots who patrolled Ground Zero, and he watched tower 2 fall, and he says he called (predicted) it.
I was a cub reporter for a weekly newspaper in Dearborn, MI (largest concentration of Arabs outside the Mid East).
I had a early-morning Chamber of Commerce breakfast where the mayoral candidates were speaking (primary day). As I was driving to the office, I was half-listening to the morning shock jocks talking about ObL and the Trade Center, and I assumed they were discussing the 1993 bombing. Then I start to wonder why they’re talking in the present tense. Finally I realize that something big was happening in NYC, so I made a U-turn and went back to my house to watch some news. I got in there just in time to watch the first tower collapse.
I hopped in my car and flew to the office, where people were watching the news on a crappy little black-and-white TV in the back. Between the static and lines, we saw the second tower collapse.
This being Dearborn, we almost immediately started getting calls from news agencies from around the world asking about reports of rioting and looting in Dearborn. ABC News had heard there were 30,000 dead from the riots in Dearborn. We were also getting calls from nervous residents who were also hearing stories about Arabs rioting in Dearborn.
So at lunch time the editorial staff went for a drive in the most Arab-heavy part of town to see what was really going on, and, not surprisingly, it was as quiet as a church on Monday. We ate at a Middle Eastern restaurant, and the people there were glued to the TVs. No rioting.
There were 2 arrests made in Dearborn that day: Two rednecks drove in from the sticks and were walking around with baseball bats looking to “settle the score.”
I was home sick that day, and had NBC on. I was playing on my computer when the first tower was hit, when it wasn’t known yet what plane it was. I went to watch a bit of the coverage and was horrified. I alternated between that and the computer, and was watching when they were focusing on the towers and suddenly the second tower was hit by the other plane. At that point everyone realized this wasn’t a horrible accident, and the tone of the coverage changed immediately after the initial shock.