Shame about the comments about “turning Palestine into a smooth sheet of atomic glass” and such like. Not a very productive way of reacting to the murder of your fellow citizens, even if understandable in the heat of the moment.
Every single thread started that day was about it. There were hundreds.
Oh yeah. Come to think of it, I remember that.
Too bad we can’t search for threads based on the day they were started. At least I don’t think we can. I’ve tried searching for that one before to no avail.
Well, apart from being the wrong country/region, I think everyone’s emotions were running high that day…whether it was fear, horror, shock, grief, or fury.
I watched the towers fall on the TV in the reception area of my company with about 100 other people. Some were crying. There was a women in a absolute state as she was on work trip. She was from NY and her kid was in a day care right beside the towers and her husband worked in one.
When I heard about the Pentagon I was convinced like many I was watching the beginning of WWIII. I was scared.
I’ve been watching a lot of shows about it. CH4 had a show the other night about the calls made from the Towers. Truely heartbreaking.
The most used phrase was “I love you” 
I was working in the office of my now-defunct graphics studio in Charleston, SC. My web guy was trying to update a client’s website and couldn’t access the internet; every time he’d get on, he’d get bumped after a second or two.
Me, my web guy, Todd, and my sales guy, Josh (it was a very little studio) broke for lunch and went to a little bar & grill down the street. It was kind of a little sports bar-ish place with several TVs scattered throughout. When we walked in, all of the TVs were turned to CNN; all of them showing footage of the first plane hitting the tower. There were some hushed conversations going on, but overall the place was quiet and still. Everyone was staring at a TV.
My web guy, Todd, asked the hostess what was going on, and where the airplane had crashed into a building. “Haven’t you guys heard?!” she whispered, “It happened just a little while ago; someone flew a plane into the World Trade Center in New York. On purpose.”
We sat down and watched as the whole fucked-up thing unfolded; the second plane, the tower collapse, the plane at the Pentagon, the plane that went down after the passengers fought back.
We sat for well over 3 hours as more people came drifting in. The cooks weren’t cooking, the waitresses weren’t bringing food, and no one was ordering. The barkeep pouring the occasional shot was the only one working, and even he kept one eye on the TV.
I’m sure I posted in one of the threads, but I first heard about it on Imus as I pulled in to the work parking lot. “A plane flew into the tower? How could they not miss it?”, thinking some small plane and a pilot who lost control somehow???
When I realized what was going on, I thought of my brother who I thought worked in one of the towers but actually worked in the WTC 7 I think. I was so lucky because he saw it from the street and ran home and was able to call me before the phones got so tied up. I felt bad for being so fortunate, but it meant I could call my grandma and reassure her.
At first I thought it was a joke, too. Then I thought, “What fucking idiot runs a plane into something that large?!” We were all drawn upstairs where there was a hoity-toity corporate club that had a TV and watched the towers fall. It was horrific. I rembmer them focusing on the people throwing themselves out the window and watching the bodies bounce and slide against the glass on the way down.
My sister was supposed to be on the plane from Boston to LA. We had no idea if she was alive or dead. All the cell phone networks were clogged, so we couldn’t get a call through. But the day before, one of her subordinates had asked to take her place because she’d never gotten to visit Hollywood. My sister, her supervisor, was tired of traveling and agreed. She’s always felt responsible for that girl’s death.
Those few hours were like Armageddon. It was so hard to figure out what was going on - after the planes smashed into the WTC, then into the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania, there were rumors of more down in other places, too. It was total chaos.
By 11 a.m. they had evacuated our building and a friend of mine met at a Friday’s. We didn’t want to go to our respective homes and be alone.
I was on a plane, flying from New Delhi to Hong Kong to San Francisco to Seattle. The attacks happened while we were in the air from Hong Kong to San Francisco.
The first time any passengers knew anything was out of the ordinary is when we landed - in Vancouver, BC. The guy sitting next to me in the window seat said “Hey, this isn’t San Francisco.” At that point, people started getting on their cell phones. I heard someone say “World Trade Center” but I was mostly thinking about travel and missing my connecting flight to Seattle and just normal things.
Plane chatter got louder and louder and after awhile I could figure out something was wrong, I heard the word “bombing”, people on the plane were very agitated. The pilot came on the loudspeaker and said that planes had crashed into the world trade center and all incoming planes to the US had been diverted, we had been diverted to Vancouver. He turned the loudspeakers to a radio station and we all listened to the news.
We sat on the plane for about 3 hours - basically in silence, no complaining that I remember, tons of wide-bodied planes from Asia were being diverted to Vancouver and they weren’t prepared to process us all. Back in 2001, I didn’t carry a cell phone with me, but someone was generous enough to loan me one for a second to phone my boyfriend at the time, he had been frantic - he knew I was in the air and knew my arrival time, but didn’t know my flight number or even airline. The travel office for my company refused to release my itinerary to him and he had no idea if I was returning from New Delhi via the Pacific or Atlantic routes. I had made the trip before - from New Delhi to Amsterdam to Detroit to Seattle, I could have been flying from the east coast.
After we got off the plane, we went through the most stringent security check I have ever encountered, every single carry-on item was emptied and searched, every person was wanded/patted down. They couldn’t give us our checked bags, they just kept yelling “keep moving, keep moving.” Tons of people from my flight didn’t speak English, lots of people crying, huge huge huge crowds at the airport, lines at payphones 10 people deep. All the rental cars were booked, all the trains were full.
I finally ended up at an Elephant & Castle bar in the airport, those pubs usually have a red British style phone booth as decoration. Turns out, there was an actual payphone in the one at the Vancouver airport, no lines at all. My boyfriend at the time was going to drive from Seattle to Vancouver to pick me up (neither of us had ever driven to Vancouver before and it was a 2 hour drive), so I settled down. None of the TVs at the bar were allowed to show anything about the tragedy, I watched episodes of Star Trek: The Next Generation. I used the pay phones to call my boss, my mom, my dad.
A friend of ours online who lived near the Canadian border confirmed via chat that the borders WERE open. My boyfriend at the time, John, was able to get to Vancouver without any incident. He picked me up and we drove to Seattle. Of all the places to be diverted, Vancouver was a great option. I had made a logistical error on my trip out of New Delhi - my flight had left at 10:00 pm and I hadn’t showered in the evening (just the morning), my total travel time (including a plane delay on the ground in New Delhi, layover in Hong Kong and time in Vancouver) was over 50 hours, I reeked by the time I got home.
My bags showed up about 2 weeks later. I was so grateful to be home and okay. I definitely never travel now without sharing my full itinerary. I was really shaken up for a couple of days - being in the air on a plane when it happened made me feel, I don’t know, closer to it somehow. I know that I was so lucky, I was just dirty and without my luggage for a few weeks, I was so lucky.
While we were in the air, looking back, there were only 2 signs that something was not right. I asked the flight attendant if I were going to miss my connecting flight to Seattle and she put her hand over my hand and told me not to worry about it (in retrospect, because she knew there was no connecting flight for me). Also, the little screens that show where the plane is flying (distance, temperature) went black. I figured it was just a malfunction at the time. I have to commend the flight crew - for all they knew we could have had a lunatic on board, they really held it together and showed NO SIGNS anything was out of the ordinary.
I had a slightly different experience than most people in the US, by the time I knew about the attacks, they were definitely attacks and not some kind of horrible accident.
I’ve seen the documentaries on how the FAA ordered all the planes down, and how the air traffic controllers got everyone landed with no incident. There was some talk about writing up procedures, but then they realized the ATCs needed flexibility to react to the fluid situations, so they decided to let them handle it on their own.
So many heroes that day.
I was unemployed at the time, and when I woke up I turned on the TV, saw the north tower burning, said “This show sucks”, and flipped over to the Game Show Network. It took me a minute to realize that just maybe I was missing something really important.
Within an hour or two I was ranting and raving about how we should nuke Afghanistan. By mid-afternoon I was emotionally wrung out and needed to take a nap. When I went out at dinner time, I expected to see angry mobs in the streets. What I saw instead was normal people doing normal things on a normal day. It was so normal that it was almost creepy.
I was playing chess over the innernet when my son phoned me and screamed at me to turn on the TV.
I’ll never forget those terrible sights and like yojimboI thought WW3 was about to start
When the first plane hit and there was a newsflash on CNN, I called my son in Korea. His first response was “Again!?”-- referring to the first WTC attack-- so he assumed right away it was an attack whereas I thought it was a horrible accident.
We were both on the phone, watching it on CNN on opposite sides of the globe, when the second plane flew up behind the reporter’s head and crashed into the second tower. We were stunned.
I think those minutes and hours were the most horrible events I ever witnessed in my life.
Later that day I drove out to the airport because planes to the US had been grounded and I wanted to see if anyone needed a place to stay, but arrangements had already been made for everyone.
To this day, I can’t even see a picture of the WTC without feeling Dickinson’s “zero at the bone”.
I was (and am) not in the habit of watching news in the morning, so I was on my way to, of all things, a haircut appointment. It was about 10 a.m. My then-boyfriend was driving, and kept punching the radio stations to try to find music. After about five minutes of him punching through every single preset and hearing talking (but not staying on any of them long enough to listen to the content), I said “we need to stay on a station, I think something’s happened, they wouldn’t all be on news at the same time this long.”
The first story we heard was of a plane hitting the Pentagon. That was discussed for several minutes, which was shocking enough, and we were both aghast. THEN…the update on the WTC towers (which, by that time, had already fallen, I think?), and I just burst into sobs instantaneously.
At the salon, my hairdresser (a close personal friend) and I silently listened to the radio coverage. Unfortunately, he chose a talk station, and the first words out of the first callers mouth were “This happened because we let too many of THOSE PEOPLE into OUR COUNTRY!!!”
I was an adjunct faculty at that time, and the CC at which I had class that night did NOT cancel classes, so I had to teach. I had several students of Middle Eastern descent or actually from the Middle East in my two evening classes - none of them came to school that night, or ever again, as far as I could tell.
I think the Dope did very well that day, considering the responses I saw on other message boards years later.
I read a bit of Cartooniverse’s thread, but it was bumming me out too much, knowing that everyone who was breathing that shit that day is probably dead or dying of respiratory failure now.
ETA: Here in Calgary, we had just gotten back from vacation, and were woken up by my alarm which came on mistakenly. We heard the news in a fog - what the hell are they talking about? It startled us enough to get up and turn on the television, and that’s all we did the rest of that day.
- the poster formerly known as featherlou
That was one of my first thoughts, too - along with, “It’s been almost 50 years since World War II and we haven’t learned ANYTHING.”
You broke for lunch at 8-something in the morning? Was the bar really pouring drinks* at 8 in the morning? Just curious.
*Under the circumstances, ok, but still…
I was working for a retailer in the Eaton Centre that day. In fact, it was my very first day working in that store… I’d just been promoted to management from one of the smaller stores in the district.
The buildings in Toronto’s financial district were evacuated shortly after the second tower was hit (since we were the next closest major city with a stock exchange), including all the lower-level retail stores. Our mall opted to stay open… I guess they figured that there was a slim possibility that someone in the city would rather be shopping for new jeans instead of glued to the TV trying to understand the incomprehensible.
The worst part about the whole thing is that we had no radios, no internet and no TVs in the store… at first, we had no idea that anything had even happened, aside from the fact that we hadn’t seen too many customers come in that morning. We started getting info in dribs and drabs by about 9:30am, but we didn’t even know the full extent of it until our sister store in the financial district called to let us know they were evacuating - that’s when we realised something really really messed up was going down. I remember running down the hall to an electronics store during my morning just, because I just needed to see for myself.
In all the years I worked in that mall, I can’t remember seeing it as deserted as it was that day, or in the days immediately afterwards.
I can barely remember the names of my coworkers from that store now… but I certainly remember that day.
Okay, I went back and read Cartooniverse’s story. That was quite a piece.
Meant to say too that I avoided all video of it. I had heard the radio reports of people jumping and even though our company put up TVs to watch, I just stayed in the office. Years later I saw the footage of the second plane hit during a fictional movie, movie theater size. That had much more impact for me that it was meant to since I had never seen it before.