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

I had taken the day off work. It was my daughter’s first day of kindergarten; she was taking the bus to school all by herself and we were worried she might have separation anxiety or something. She was fine, and hopped on the bus without a care in the world. It was a proud moment.

I went inside to check email and saw a message from a friend about a plane hitting the WTC in New York. I went upstairs and turned on CNN. I watched as the second plane hit and knew at that instant it was an attack. I followed the news for a couple of hours and was numb. I remember saying to my wife that this was going to change the world as we knew it.

I went out in the afternoon to cut the lawn and kept staring to the south-east fully expecting to see smoke in the air all the way from Ottawa: I didn’t.

Even as a Canadian I felt horrible about the events of that day. I can’t imagine how I would have felt as an American, a New Yorker, or a family member. And then to see the Palestinians out celebrating in the streets? WTF? I can’t imagine any civilized person in any part of the world celebrating the mass murder of thousands of people, ANY PEOPLE! (At the time it was thought that up to 10,000 people could have been killed).

I was getting ready for school. I walked out of the bathroom and Mom had the TV on, which we never did in the morning. Watched until it was time to go to school, where we did some emergency fire drills. Then I had a class in the computer lab where I just refreshed the Dope thread over and over. I was still just a lurker back then.

I live in Los Angeles, so the events were well underway when I woke up to go to work at about 7:00 that morning. My roommate had left the TV on, but it was on ESPN so a re-run of SportsCenter was on.

I got into my car as usual, turned on the radio as I began the drive to work, putting on Mark & Brian of KLOS, as I always did back then. I immediately knew something was amiss, as they weren’t being the jocular fools they normally were, and instead were watching Peter Jennings and describing what they were seeing on TV. One tower had already collapsed, and I listened to them describe the last tower as it fell.

I still went to work, but all I did that day was scour the Internet for news and share the shock and horror with my co-workers.

I was completing a woodworking project and I heard it on the radio.

The first thing I did was sign on to my financial 401K site and transferred everything from stocks to cash.

Analyzing the toxic dust cloud from the fall of the WTC: September 11 Toxic Dust: Deciphering My Pocketful Of Terror | HuffPost Impact

I actually remember seeing the front page photo of the Star Tribune the next day and thinking “that is a spectacular photo.” It was a clear, full-color shot of the second plane hitting the south tower.

This, of course, was overshadowed by my next thought, which was “hundreds of people are dying as this photo is being taken.”

I was on my way to work when I heard on the radio that the first plane hit, but there were no details. It was assumed to be an accident at the time. I think it had only been a few minutes. I sat outside in front of the school for a few minutes until the second plane hit then ran in to tell my co-workers who had no idea. They acted like it was no big deal, that I was overreacting. Maybe I was since there was no real threat here to me in Tennessee, but I felt like there might be.

My job was to go to the elementary schools to perform vision screenings, and we were told the schools were all on lockdown until noon so we had to just sit there. My daughter was homeschooled at the time so I spent most of my day on the phone with her. I remember that night neither of us could sleep. We just kept watching the television, waiting for something else to happen. And of course it did, and the news became more and more bleak as the days wore on.

I stopped into a pseudo-Irish pub on Pigalle on the way home from work and the bartender was blasting “How Does It Feel” or whatever that BDylan tune is called while the towers burning were on TV. That’s before I knew what happened. Later that night people were throwing firecrackers into my apartment courtyard until some crusty old bastard said (I can’t do the diacritics so here’s a translation): “Stop it, or I’ll call the cops.” In general, lots of jubilant noisemaking until November. People in the 18th were stoked as shit. Kind of disheartening. That’s when I decided my little stipend as a professor wasn’t worth it there.

At that time the place I worked had an American parent company, based in Georgia. I was on the phone to one of our regular contacts in the international department and she suddenly interrupted our conversation with something along the lines of “OMG a plane has hit the WTC”. I stayed on the line with her for a while, all thoughts of business forgotten, while she relayed the news in real time.

Meantime one of my colleagues had switched on the TV in our office and we all watched the unfolding drama in stunned silence.

This would have been early afternoon UK time and we shut the office early and went home. I turned on the TV as soon as I got in and spent the rest of the day in front of it, watching and re-watching the coverage until about midnight. The scale of the tragedy was almost too much to contemplate and I went to bed hoping to wake up and find it was all a bad dream.

Certainly a JFK moment for me

I was there - oh God.

I was working out of a home office in a rented flat in a town about halfway between Philadelphia and Reading, PA. I got up a little before 9 in the morning, fired up the computer, hit the SDMB and saw a thread asking about a plane crashing into the World Trade Center. I flipped on the TV just in time to see the second plane hit. I called my sister, who lived a couple towns away, and left a message saying something like, “Turn on the TV right now, you’re not going to believe what you are seeing.” I spent most of the rest of the day watching the news coverage.

Saw it live on tv. The first tower had just been hit when I happened to turn on the tv. I was going to catch the weather forecast at 9:10 before leaving for work.

They were all discussing the accident and how it could happen. Then the 2nd plane appeared and it was apparent it was a terrorist attack. I called in and didn’t go to work. Spent the day glued to the tv.

This was in Paris, France?

If you’d like to tell us more, I’m certain I’m not alone in being interested in what you have to say.

About 1am I got a call from my dad to get up and turn the TV on. They’d been listening to the radio and something had happened in the States - it would have been just before 9am New York time.

I’d just woken up enough to take in the fact that a plane had hit the WTC and they thought it could have been a terrible accident, when the second plane hit and they knew it wasn’t.

By the time my kid woke up at 7am, I’d seen everything unfold as it happened. I don’t remember anything else about that day.

Well, I left the Citicorp buiding (where I worked) after the first plane struck. My daughter, who was attending NYU had a dorm about 3 blocks from the WTC. She eventually saw the collapse of the towers from her dorm window. My plan was to go and get her at her dorm. My cab could not go further south than 14th street, where I got out and began to walk. Odd thing, St. Vincent’s Hospital on 14th street had a triage set up outside in preparation for the casualties, but there were no casualties to be seen. The reality hit me hard that anyone near the towers are now dead as I continued heading south to Lafayette street. Somewhere around Canal street, my cell phone rang (could not make any outgoing calls) and my wife said that my daughter is on a land line by Washington Square Park. They had evacuated the dorm upon the collapse of the towers. By then, the debris and dust had reached north of Canal and in the mayhem, I met my daughter and her friends on the outskirts of the NYU community. NYC was in lock down. I took my daughter and her friends North. By some miracle, we were able to catch the last and only train leaving Penn Station heading East to Long Island. As soon as we had boarded the train, the doors closed and for the next 90 minutes of our commute, all you could hear is the crying of the passengers and see the dust clouding the train cars as we brushed each other off. Lost my job because of 911. Joined the Department of Homeland Security and served for 9 years up until my disability retirement on May 17 of this year.

Thank you for that.

Man, I am semi-embarrassed to admit this, but I really didn’t experience 9/11. I live just outside of DC, in Montgomery County, MD.

On that day, I was working in a real estate office as an office manager. The only two official employees were my boss and myself. The sales staff never had to clock in, so they usually never came to the office until after lunch. My boss usually came in around, say 10 or 1030 am, because she always stayed late to help the sales staff. I got to work at 8 am. When I got there, I logged into my computer (as this was my method of clocking in and checking in with the corporate office for my timecard) and started to do my daily routine around the office. This means running around, checking the copiers, distributing faxes, data entry for newly arrived contracts, checking printers and what not. General office stuff.

Our office had just opened in August, meaning we were still scheduling to have contractors install phones, internet connections, etc., and we were still building our sales staff as well, so we didn’t have anybody else in the office besides just li’l old me. It’s not like we had a TV or sales staff had moved personal items like radios and what not into the office.

(I don’t remember the actual time.) Sometime after the first plane hit the first tower, my boss calls the office.

The conversation went something like this:

Boss: “What are you doing at work?”
UBW: “It’s Tuesday. I always work on Tuesday.”
Boss: “Haven’t you heard what’s going on?”
UBW: “No. What are you talking about?”
(The second plane hits the second tower while we’re on the phone.)
Boss: “Oh my God…” and she hangs up. I still have no clue what’s going on.

Now, my boss was a very emotional person, and local news coverage is very panic prone. Anytime anything happens, all the local channels are all over it. Like when the stop lights malfunction in DC all of the news channels start talking about “gridlock”. So while I don’t know what’s going on, I figure somebody ran over a squirrel or something on her route to work. I go about my job and it’s business as usual.

I usually take my lunch approx. 1 PM. There’s still nobody else in the office. I turn on the office voicemail and walk across the street to the mall to get lunch. When I get to the mall, I find they have locked the doors. ??? They NEVER lock the doors. I’ve wandered into the mall well after closing and the doors are never locked. They’re always open 24/7, for security people, cleaning staff and deliveries and whatever else they do at the mall after hours.

So I still don’t know what’s going on. I walk back to the office plaza where my office is located and want to go to the deli three doors down. They’re closed as well. ???

I go back to my office and jump on my computer to see what I can get delivered. This is the first time I have been on the internet on my computer, except for my first daily login and the contract entry software program. As I start searching for nearby delivery places, I start to see the news about all the day’s events. NOW, I am just stunned. After a few articles, I lock the office door and put a sign on the door saying if you need me that I’ll be at the Myer-Emco store a few doors down. I’m watching the news over there now because I can’t read the news fast enough. And I start to watch the video replays.

About an hour later, my boss comes into the store and she offers to take me to lunch. We found a place that was still open and we talk about what’s going on. She’s had all morning to sort it out, but I’m still sort of desensitized by the initial shock of hearing what has happened. She’s all yap yap yap about what happened, but I’m still trying to figure it out while watching the TV in the restaurant and (rudely) only halfway listening to her.

I won’t bother to detail my emotions for the rest of the day, because I was really angry and lost. But that’s how I spent my morning that day. It was not a good day.

Yeah. Don’t get me wrong – I’m no racist asshole, but the anecdote about the firecrackers are 100% true, as is the bartender (I didn’t mention this part) was a total dickhole to me and ended up pouring my Guiness down the drain when I was looking at the TV to see what happened and didn’t hear him say something about the price of the beer. Even at flea markets like at St. Sulpice, some people were rocking the music loud for weeks afterwards. To their credit, the older French (I guess I had a slight accent or just looked a bit ricain) always expressed solidarity (unasked for) if I had a beer or coffee at a cafe’.

I was at work, at a dead-end office job in the UK. One of my friends and I would spend hours on the phone bored gossiping, so when he called at about 3pm(ish) and said “have you seen the news?” I didn’t think much of it, and tore shreds off him, pointing out I had no radio or TV in my office.

I think at that stage the towers had both been hit, plus the Pentagon. I alternated between the BBC news site and Ananova.com to try and get updates, and remember the headline going from “One tower has fallen” (refresh) “Both towers have fallen”.

I left work early, and remember stopping to talk to people on the street asking had they heard, what was the latest. United 93 was still missing when I left work, but down by the time I got home.

I really thought at the time that it would have been the start of World War 3.

Around the time the first plane hit, I was getting a traffic ticket.

It was my second week at my new job as a teacher assistant in an elementary school (my first full-time job out of college). I was never very clear on how exactly to enter the parking lot, because the school was not located on a main street, and you had to take one of several twisty side streets to get there. I had been driving past the front of the school building, apparently where the buses pull up, although I had so far gotten there before the buses and missed them. That day I was a few minutes late, and accidentally got mixed up in a line of buses waiting to pull up, and was promptly ticketed by a policeman, probably waiting to catch clueless parents. Instead he caught me, a clueless TA.

So I went into work. At my job, in the morning I was to teach remedial reading to a small group of students, and later in the day, go into the regular classrooms and help out the teachers. So I had no adult interaction that morning. It wasn’t until probably around 11 that I saw another teacher who said to me, “Did you hear what happened?” That was obviously pretty vague, so I said I hadn’t heard anything. Then she told me that there had been “an attack” on the World Trade Center. Again, not very specific, so I didn’t think much of it. I remembered the failed bombing attempt of 1993 and figured it was something like that.

It wasn’t until around lunchtime, when I heard more people talking about it, that I figured it was something serious. Not wanting to admit I didn’t know what was going on, I called my mom, who was also at work. That’s when I heard that it was 2 planes that had been deliberately flown into the building.

When she said that they were hijacked passenger planes, that’s when I started crying. My immediate thought was, “Oh my God, all those innocent people on those planes.” Looking back, I guess I should have been more upset over the people in the building. At least the people on the planes probably died fairly quickly, and many of them probably didn’t know exactly what was going to happen. Whereas the people in the towers, above the impact, had several torturous minutes of smoke, heat, fear and desperation.

The principal made the decision to not say anything to the students, and just go on with the day as usual. That day a lot of parents came to pick their kids up at the end of the school day instead of letting them take the bus. I remember hearing the next day that students asked “Why didn’t you tell us?” and the teachers saying things like, “We didn’t have all the facts,” which I guess was kind of true.

I was not directly impacted on a personal level because I did not know anyone in the buildings or on the planes.