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

In My Humble Opinion
61

My daughter had just started college, and I was dropping her off when the first bulletin came over the radio. There weren’t any details, but I remember saying to her, “this won’t be good.” By the time I got to work, the second plane had hit. I called my wife to make sure she had heard what happened, and then turned on a little TV I had in my cubicle, just in time to hear a plane had hit the Pentagon. The sight of the towers collapsing, even on a tiny black and white TV, is still burned into my mind.

What I mostly remember about the day was the silence. There were no pedestrians on the streets, and almost no traffic. There was a bank in the lobby of the building where I worked. Normally they only had a single guard who stayed mostly out of the way. By 10:00 there were two guards stationed at the door, and it stayed like that for days.

That evening we found out that some neighbors had a son who worked in Tower #1. They had no idea whether he made it or not. (He didn’t.)

62

I was working nights in the lab, so I was sleeping. My grandmother woke me up to come and watch CNN with her. I was less than pleased. I called my mother and told her to turn on the tv. Then, when the CNN loop restarted with no new information (about ten minutes) I went back to bed. There was still no more new news when I got up at 4:30 to go back to the lab.

At work that night, they had the CBC radio on the PA system in the lab. That was a nice change from the crappy commercial radio they usually had on.

63

I was playing Starcraft. Then real life terrorists zerged NYC.

64

It would probably be the same one I was working for. By coincidence, that happened to be the week of my new hire training and I was in Texas with my start class (about 20 New Yorkers, another 20 or so from DC and a total of about 300 or so new hires across the North American practice).

The best way to describe it was like that scene in Starship Troopers when Bueno Aires gets destroyed and the whole camp gradually just drops whatever they are doing to go find a tv monitor to watch the coverage. Then mostly we just drank for the next three days until the company could charter us buses back home.

My girlfriend was working at 3 World Financial and happened to be getting off the Hoboken ferry right when the first plane hit. And then immediately got right back on.

65

I had just moved back to my hometown to get my act together (work, drinking, etc) and was supposed to have a job interview later that afternoon. I remember sitting in my bedroom watching The Today Show and the first plane hit right behind Matt and Katie. It all happened on live television and I guess I was in serious shock because I went on to the grocery store just like I was doing anyway. Then I went downtown Indy for my job interview and ended up sitting and having drinks at a bar and someone had one of the early print newspapers with the big headlines. At that point, we were all pretty convinced the US was under attack all over.

The other thing that stuck with me was how weird the skies looked empty of aircraft. It was a very surreal day.

66

Ugh. This thread is making me cry.

I’m on the West Coast and had rolled out of bed around 9:30 or something so I think everything had already happened. I was making breakfast and the phone rang and I picked it up. I was selling homemade soap at the time and it was a fellow soapmaker I was going to be sharing a booth with at an upcoming craft fair. I was all “How are you?” and she’s like “Terrible, we’re under terrorist attack.” and I was like WHAAAAA? It didn’t even register with me until I hung up and turned on the TV.

My husband and I had had plans to go see “Oklahoma” that night at the Stanford theater across the bay and we ended up still going because we were stunned and couldn’t think not to. (I vaguely remember talking with a local newspaper person about it outside the theater.) While I waited for him out front a kid came along selling American flag stickers for as much as anyone was willing to pay. I think I gave him $5 for one. It’s weird what you remember.

I think the most horrifying moment for me was I was watching a documentary about one of the firehouses responding about six months later and at one point a group of them were standing in front of the doors of one of the towers under an…not an awning because it was hard…you know where the cars drive up under? Anyway there’s all this thudding and they don’t know what it is. It was the bodies of the people jumping. :frowning:

67

My wife had a migraine and we were out of aspirin so after waking up late I drove the short distance to the local drugstore. I had been out late the night before and had listened to a baseball game on WFAN in my car so the radio was on that station the next morning and playing the Imus show which I never listened to though I knew he was popular.

He was in the middle of telling some long involved “story” about a plane crash and I kept thinking “Geez stop blathering and get to the punch line.” After a bit I began to wonder. I parked the car in the lot and took out my cell phone. I cold only get an analog signal and remember thinking “ut oh that’s not good.” My wife answered and I told her to turn on CNN. She said “I’ve got it on.” and just from the tone of her voice I knew it was very bad.

I got home in time to see both towers collapse on TV. I spent a lot of the rest of the day talking to a colleague whose wife worked in one of the lower buildings. He didn’t know that she wasn’t there at the time but out talking to clients. He didn’t find out until she finally called from one of the train stations in CT.

68

As I was driving to work (to Herndon, VA), I was listening to NPR. They interrupted the show with an item about how a private plane had hit the World Trade Center. By the time I got to the office about 9:00 they were still a little confused about what was going on. Once at my desk I heard a second plane hit, and by then everyone was watching news feeds live online. I was stunned as I watched, and saw the building on fire pouring out smoke; I think it was CNN. By 11:00 the boss sent us all home. I got a call from day care to pick our kids up.

When I got there, the director took me aside. One of the children who was in my daughter’s class had a mother who worked in D.C. and was having trouble getting out of the city. And his father was on a business trip to NYC and was in a meeting in an upper floor of the one of the towers. Although it bent the rules the director asked me to take him home until his mother could pick him up. She was beside herself when she arrived, though the situation was still chaotic and it was not yet obvious that this boy’s father was not coming home.

69

I was a freshman in high school. I walked into my US Government class, and found my teacher standing in front of the TV with a VERY worried look on her face. She’d turned the TV on because we were going to watch a movie that day, and it happened to be on CNN. We stood there for a moment and watched the north tower burn, wondering what had just happened. My first thought was “they bombed the World Trade Center AGAIN?”

After a minute I went to my seat and took out my stuff, and as I looked up at the TV again I saw the second plane hit. I remember thinking “oh, a PLANE hit it,” and thought that the footage I’d just seen was being replayed from earlier. I quickly learned that, nope, it had just happened, this time to the south tower. That stunned me.

We still watched the movie like we’d planned, but in the middle of it the principal came over the loudspeakers and announced the attack, this time adding the Pentagon to the list. That stunned me even more.

My Government teacher at one point grabbed the phone and left the room so that she could try and contact her uncle, who worked in one of the towers. Naturally, she couldn’t get through, but I learned later that he turned out to be okay (I think he’d stayed home sick that day).

The rest of that day was very surreal. I walked around feeling very numb, not quite able to believe what had just happened, what was STILL happening. My second class was an impromptu “independent work day,” but no one got any work done. My teacher for that class went to comfort another teacher, who was crying in the hall. The rest of my teachers were of the “try to forget about it and have a normal school day” mindset, though this didn’t work very well when even those teachers kept the TV on the whole time (the only exception was my orchestra class). I ended up still having homework, something my sister thought was pretty amazing–she didn’t do ANY work that day.

That night, when my dad said evening grace around the dining room table, he added a blessing for “those who were murdered today.” His use of the word “murder” still gives me chills.

70

I just got back from walking my kid to the bus stop, thought I’d turn on the news before heading upstairs to my [home] office. I flipped on CNN and saw people running in the street and then the first tower collapse. I don’t think I changed the channel or even moved, blinked or took a breath for about 6 months.

71

This is an account I wrote on another site for the 5th anniversary of the attacks:

72

My story is in post #45 of a thread I started last year at this time, Ask the 9/11 survivor.

73

I think this thread happens every year.

The short version? A classmate asked me on the way into a geology exam if I’d heard about the plane hitting the WTC, I said no, wow, what an accident. Finished the exam, went to my car, and the radio announcer said, “The second tower just came down!”

I ended up in a room with a TV with a bunch of people for awhile staring at CNN, then I went home and stared at CNN. Classes were cancelled for a day or so.

The apology we got the next class meeting from the geology prof was epic. But I didn’t blame him, none of us knew what was going on. “Plane hitting WTC” to me meant small plane, not a passenger jet.

74

I was at my psychology class and the instructor mentioned something about a plane hitting one of the trade centers. I thought it must be an accident but the girl sitting beside me said “They got the Pentagon too.” Then of course I knew it was terrorists. She pulled out a pocket computer and showed me the updates–I couldn’t believe it when they said the towers fell. I’d seen them and thought they couldn’t fall.

My mother was in town and my aunt called her and told her “Don’t get on any planes!” (She had been planning to fly to Vegas.) When my mother asked why, my aunt told her to turn on the TV. After that my mother called my sister, who dropped the phone and ran to tell her husband (he has relatives in NYC.) My mother thought my sister had fainted.

My mother arrived to pick me up at the university and I just asked her “Are we at war yet?” All she wanted was to buy some dramamines.

75

Well, I was in junior high so I had class that day. Around first period someone told the teacher that something had hit the WTC, and it was probably a helicopter. I don’t remember what happened second period, but I wasn’t watching the news, and I think that’s when the second plane hit the tower and the towers collapsed live. Other classes watched it on the news live.

During third period, PE, we watched the news and the full impact of what happened hit me there. I think we watched the news in almost every other class as well. Maybe 1/3 to 1/2 of students got called out by their parents by the end of it all.

76

Hoo boy.

I had just gotten to my job in Louisville when I started hearing co-workers talking about it. It took me at least 90 seconds to grok what they were talking about. My dawning comprehension turned to horror, as my mother (age 71 at the time) worked on the 38th floor of the south tower and had recently had a pacemaker installed. I started calling my sisters in a panic, but they, of course, hadn’t heard from her. I talked to my dad, and he was eerily calm because he KNEW she was all right. I drove back home - I think I was the only car on the road, and I sped like crazy, finally arriving and “parking” the car directly on the front lawn, since I had heard in the last five minutes of the drive that her tower had fallen. I started to pack for a trip to NY, not knowing if the trip would be for a funeral.

Finally at about 11:30 AM one of my sisters called to say that a hospital in downtown Brooklyn had called to say she was there. We knew it was her because they mispronounced her name, as everyone always did. We later found out that the head of her law firm saw the debris from the north tower outside their windows and ordered everyone to leave, despite the PA system person saying they should stay. They took the stairs and made it to about the 20th floor when they 2nd plane hit. People were helping her get down the stairs, and then they couldn’t use the handrails because the walls became too hot! When they got out of the lobby, there were ambulances there and her boss basically tossed her into one of the ambulances (which were transporting about 8 people at a time) despite her protests, and she wound up in Brooklyn (and didn’t see either tower fall). Thanks to the quick thinking of the boss, no one at her firm died. My mom was OK.

The rest of the day was weird, mainly because we went out (we couldn’t stay in and watch the same footage over and over) and encountered people who were all panicked, while all we felt was relief, since we had already assumed the worst about my mom.

77

I was in my seventh grade english class at the time. Our teacher was acting a little shifty and kids were being called out every minute. Sooner or later, I was called too. My aunt had come to pick me up. I thought that was a little odd. She had told me what happened in the car. I remember not exactly knowing what the WTC was or how significant this all was, but I do remember being more concerned about the rest of my family.

I’m from Maryland and we live close to PA, but about 45 minutes from Baltimore. I also have 2 older brothers. Oldest brother went to college in Dover so my parents were en route to pick him up for the weekend when they get a call from the high school. Older brother is epileptic and had a seizure (grand mal) at school. It was bad enough that he was airlifted to Shock Trauma in Bmore. My dad called my uncle to pick up my oldest brother as they turned around for Bmore. They hadn’t listened to the radio all morning. They were surprised at how tight security seemingly was at Shock Trauma for such a normal day.

For the next couple weeks or so, my older brother had a black eye and a neck brace. One of the teachers actually credited him for their knowledge of the attack. This teacher (who taught both of my brothers and me at some point) said that if it weren’t for him going to help my brother during his seizure, he would have never turned the TV on and no one would have known about the attacks as they happened.

My pop pop died a couple weeks after that. It was a hard month.

78

It was mid-afternoon here. I had just picked up my older son from school and gave both boys a snack. They found things to play with, I sat down at my computer, and discovered that while I had been away, I’d gotten about a jillion emails and all the news-related websites on the World Wide Web had slowed to a crawl. (Actually the Scandinavian ones were still functioning, barely, but English-language sites were overwhelmed.)

79

I was sitting in my bosses cube with him discussing some meetings for Thursday when our division head came by and said a plane had hit the WTC. I thought it was some little commuter plane and had mild interest. We watched the smoke coming out of the tower for a while and speculated about what happened. We were still watching when we saw the 2nd plane hit.

80

I was coming into work when I heard on the radio that a “plane” had hit the first tower. I assumed it was a small plane and switched the station and arrived at work soon after. I wasn’t really tuned into what was going on until I hit another forum and saw a thread going on it. The rest of the day was largely spent listening to the radio at my desk and helping to update the thread for those stuck at work without news (all the news sites were practically crashed out from traffic).