Anybody have stories of 9/11/01 so-what-itude?

In My Humble Opinion
41

On 9/11/01 I was temping at the front desk of a small office near Seattle. Although the office had a staff of six and no visitors or customers, the boss turned the radio down midmorning (Pacific time) and made us (pretend to) go back to work. Of course we surreptitiously surfed to news sites, but most of the servers were too slammed to deliver any content.

Sometime that day one of my cow-orkers, trading rumors on the phone with his friends, told me “we just declared war on Afghanistan.” Maybe my reply – “ten bucks says we didn’t” – could be interpreted as so-what-itude, but I hope not.

42

Hubby and many of his co-workers have told me that they saw some of the inmates laugh, clap and cheer as the Towers fell.

43

I was unemployed at the time so I have no work stories. I was on a Listserv for a hobby of mine. We were all checking in and talking about it and hashing things out when one guy said “Can we get back on topic?” Everyone just flamed him. Instead of you know, bowing out gracefully and apologizing he started to quote Star Wars lines at us. It was just bizarre.
The list’s rule about swearing was lifted after that.

44

Uhh, I’ll vote for “had other things on your mind”.

45

I had a Director basically tell me to get back to work. She didn’t say it outright but the jist of it was “shit happens”. I was pretty stressed because I tagged it as a terrorist act and thought the buildings would collapse. It was like watching Pearl Harbor knowing the results. When the Pentagon was hit I was seriously upset.

46

Oddly enough… I’m the asshole in my story.

I’d actually taken 9/11/01 off because I had a job interview (that I was kind of lukewarm about) at 2:30 CST, so I was at home when it all went down.

About noon, the company I was interviewing with called and wanted to reschedule for another day. I told them no, we were scheduled for today, and I’d specifically taken the day off for the interview, regardless of what was happening in NY.

About halfway through, I realized that the job I was interviewing for was a step backward for me, and was glad that I hadn’t rescheduled, because it’d have been a total waste of another vacation day.

47

The closest I ever came to hitting a woman:

After spending that day in a daze, my wife and I realized that we needed to pick up a few things from the store. We went to Wal-Mart, and all the aisle TVs were delivering the day’s news.

We brought our purchases up to the register, and as I was paying the TVs were showing people jumping from the burning towers. The fucking festering scab on the face of humanity working the register turns to a co-worker and starts singing I Believe I Can Fly. My wife had to physically restrain me from belting that piece of shit right in the face.

One of my greatest regrets is not having the presence of mind at the time to get her ass canned.

48

I was between jobs on 9/11, and that morning I had appointments with a couple of placement agencies. I was finishing up a series of tests at one of them when someone came into the room and told me that a plane had just hit the WTC, and the office was closing down for the day. I told her that I was about six questions from the end and she’d have to wait anther two minutes.

In my defense, I didn’t realize the magnitude of events until I got home. When I left, it was about 10:30, and there were hundreds of people just milling around downtown Boston. Weird, at that hour, even given the beautiful weather. But I knew something *really * bad had happened when I saw that Filenes was closed. Filenes had remained open through bomb threats *in the building * when I worked there.

49

I have been following this thread closely – I wasn’t going to admit this - like the guy who farted in the elevator—but take courage to own up since Bump and DianaG did.

My Brother works in Manhattan very close to where the towers stood. My brother sent me an Email from his Blackberry at 9:09 AM saying “Tell Mom I am OK. Phones out. Heading home”.

Later my messages to his Blackberry would tell some of the panicked New Yorkers, covered in WTC dust, who were walking out of Manhattan in the vicinity of my brother that there had not in fact been a bomb at Times Square, that there were no reports of bombs in the subway, that the bridges were shut to cars, that the pentagon had been attacked etc. (mitigation against what is coming)

But my immediate reaction was to make fun of my brother and “New Yorkers” for panicking and basically call them a bunch of overreacting muttonheads who flipped because their mundane commute had encountered a bump in the road. Since 8:48 CNN had been talking about the first tower and I had been watching… but I had gone back to work minutes before the 2nd plane hit and I missed that and that reflected my response to my brother (they weren’t sure it wasn’t it private plane, I imagined a Cessna). There is a second exchange – basically he relates it is a terrorist attack. And I rolleyes and basically say “sure, sure a terrorist has flown a plane into the WTC.” Well it wasn’t long (before 9:26) before he related seeing jumping people I turned back on the news and got serious/realized

I stay vague – a) to not look like a total A-hole- and b) because my Mom donated our correspondence to a Project to memorialize 9-11 where people recorded their emails, calls, memories of it – this was like late October 2001. I initially reveal myself as a total a$$-- and will apparently do so for future generations. Hooray for me! I was. I just didn’t “get it” until after I had sent those two initial emails.

50

I think some people can be forgiven for not taking it very seriously. A pretty normal response to something so horrifying is complete denial. When I woke up jobless and late that morning, I turned on the TV, and my first reaction was “Eww, this show sucks.” I flipped over to the Game Show Network. It took me a few minutes to think “Hey, maybe I should watch that sucky show. It might be important.”

Even so, later that day I tried calling all of my family members. I got either busy signals or no answer. When I finally got through to my sister, I asked if she and her husband wee OK, and how were her daughters. “Oh, they’re good. I just dropped them off at the pool. Rachael did the cutest thing the other day. Let me tell you about it.” And on and on about her cute ragamuffins. No acknowledgement about the day’s events.

I swear, I love my sister, but she can be a real airhead sometimes.

51

I was out all morning on Wednesday April 19, 1995 and pissed off that I had to walk home in the rain. When I turned on the TV and saw a hollowed out building, I remember thinking “Can’t Beruit stop doing this?” Change the channel “Does it have to be on every station?”

It was only when the newscaster said “Oklahoma City” that I got a clue.

52

What a lucky husband she has!

I think my reaction to 9/11 is a little skewed owing to the fact that I almost got killed by a frat boy that day. I have a bizarre last name that might look faintly Arabic if you squint. My college roommate’s very large boyfriend was over and when I got in the room after being excused from class (still with only the vaguest notion of what happened, not knowing it was terrorists), this ape loomed over me and was like “S-----. That’s not an Arab name, is it?” When I was like “no” (because it’s not), he looked like he wanted to punch me anyway. Not really a so-what reaction, but definitely not of the “a tragedy just happened, let’s all get together and support each other through this tough time.” I think that encounter tainted a lot of my thoughts about 9/11 and America in general.

53

And somewhere, John Donne’s corpse spins a few times in its grave.

54

As I’ve mentioned before, I lived in New York for 25 years, before relocating back to Cleveland. From the windows of my last NYC apartment, I had a wonderful view of the Lower Manhattan skyline, including the WTC.

When 9/11 happened, my mother said to me, “Aren’t you glad you’re not still living in New York?” And over the next several days other people made similar comments to me.

The truth is that I desperately wanted to be back in New York during that horrible period. It’s sort of like when a loved one is in an accident, you want to be there, by his side, if for no other reason than just being there. But of course, shortly after 9/11, it was difficult to get flights to New York or hotel rooms, and I felt that I just would have been in the way, so I stayed home.

I did return to New York that December, just before Christmas, and even though it was over three months after 9/11, that’s all I heard people talking about, wherever I went. I walked around the perimeter of ground zero, and was amazed at the size of the area that was off limits to the public. And there was this huge sadness all over the city, the opposite of what it’s usually like there, before Christmas. Even the tree at Rockefeller Center was a reminder: the lights were all red, white and blue that year.

But I still remember what my mother said, and the other people who could never understand why I needed to return to New York after the attacks.

55

Me and a friend were crashign in her parents’ basement that morning. Her dad came down and woke us up, saying “Terrorists bombed the World Trade Center!” I immediately went to turn on the TV and computer, while my friend asked, “Is that here?” “Well, no.” And then she rolled over and went back to sleep. I spent the next few hours right here and one other news sites, with CBS on in the background.

I did go to work that day- it was at a supermarket, so there didn’t seem to be much reason to close. My boss was standing out front on his break when I arrived, and said, “Egh, shit happens.” I wasn’t really offended, because he’s just not the type to get excited about anything; possibly because he was in Vietnam.

56

I’m not sure that this is appropriate, as my experiences are not exactly what the OP called for. (I had to reword that sentence 3 times not to use the word ‘hijack’. Funny, huh?)

I worked (and still work) in downtown Jersey City, about 100 feet from the water and directly across from the WTC, as the PATH trains called it. Montgomery Street, I street I drive down daily to get to work, is a direct view to the Twin Towers, and they always looked Huge! I always promised myself I’d take pics of the view of them, as they were so close. I did take some pictures…and I might post them if asked later…but for now, you need to understand that as the crow flies, there were two football fields of distance max between the WTC and my office’s windows, with nothing in between.

I was on vacation when it happened, and my first thought was that and explosion that big might have blown out our office windows which, at negative pressure, might have sucked more than a few people out. At 30+ floors up, that’s a bad thing. Our room phones were jammed and my cell was less than useless. The only time I got through, my office number was going to ‘afterhours’, which was either very good or very bad. Please keep in mind, that at the time I had no idea how big the explosion was; I just knew that it felled both towers and had destroyed ‘countless offices nearby’. :eek:

Not knowing if family was worried about me, I called my brother’s house to let them know that I was no where near there and that we were all OK, albeit stranded. The phone gets answered by my Sister In Law. (A look-a-like for the red haired maven in the original Thunderball, and just as Evil.) What’s her response…?

“Let me get this straight…you get trapped with your whole family at a world famous theme park…and they have to let you stay free, because you have no way to get back here. And you’re calling us? What for? To Brag…?” :smack:

No, you stupid clueless shallow plastic almost female-substitute. Hope you didn’t break a nail answering the freakin’ phone. I called just to let my brother, the one with human emotions, know I was still alive, thank-you-very-much. Goes without saying that our continued breathing is no skin off your surgically-reduced nose, f-cktard.

Its five years later and it still gets me angry. (but we limit our exposure to that toxic waste-in-a-pantsuit now) :mad: