I went to school. It was the beginning of the second week of my freshman year. I had Writing 102, Math in Society, and German in the morning. I think I had some intro to philosophy course that afternoon. We basically just tried to get through the school day. None of my classes were canceled. Then I went to the grocery store and stocked up on some non-perishable items because I didn’t know what the fuck was going on—I remember the store was basically empty which is odd at 2 in the afternoon. Generally it’s full of old ladies at SAHMs that time of day. Then I went home. I don’t really remember what I did at home. watched television, I suppose.
We’re 11 hours ahead of the US East Coast this time of year (Thailand never changes its clocks), and so it was nighttime here. I was checking out the news online when I saw something about a plane hitting the World Trade Center. That was odd, but then I thought about that small plane that crashed into the Empire State Building back in the 1930s and dismissed it as being something like that.
As more news reports came filtering in, it became clear that this was something quite big indeed. I turned on the television. We don’t subscribe to cable, we’re just not TV people, too busy to bother with it, but this had become so big that every local Thai channel (there are only a few) was covering it live. (That was when we still had our place outside of Bangkok. The place we own now pipes in BBC News and MTV Taiwan, plus a Chinese and Japanese channel, but no one can tell us why.) I stayed up most of the night glued to the set and drinking most a fifth of Johnnie Walker Red that my brother-in-law had recently given me.
I was at work and saw it on TV. After work, I went and played a laser game with a friend. I remember because I remember talking to the proprietor about the attack.
I had one of the most hectic mornings in a long time at work, which culminated in a call from the Chicago Public Schools saying they were releasing all the kids from school as fast as we could get buses there.
I literally didn’t have time to watch TV, calling drivers to work, sending whoever came in off to wherever we needed them most.
Finally, around 3 PM, we got the chance to settle down, and a couple of us just stood and stared at the TV a minute. I decided I’d rather be home, and started driving.
I was practically alone on the Dan Ryan at 4 pm (imagine) when my cell phone rang. It was a VP from another bus company, calling to ask if I’d like to meet about an opening he had.
I said “you DO know what’s happening out here, right?” He said that was a good indication of just how badly he needed to find someone to replace the manager he had at the time.
I told him I’d meet him and went home to find my 14 year old daughter sitting in front of the TV just staring. We’d been in Manhattan just the summer before and she was holding the album of pictures she had from there, including one of her posing in front of what was now Ground Zero.
Then we went for pizza and ended up spending most of the night watching the news.
The week I started that new job, I was wading through an old filing cabinet and found the local newspaper from 9/13. The top of the page was a headline and article about how screwed up the school buses were for the whole first week of school. Under the fold was a little piece about NY.
When I arrived at school that morning, someone in the office said an airplane had crashed into the World Trade Center. My first thought was “Deja vu!” because I knew about the Army bomber that had collided with the Empire State Building in a fog. Then the principal came in with more information from the radio. We went into her office and turned on the TV, just in time to see the second plane hit.
We spent most of the day watching the feed in our classrooms. My Dept. Chair still remembers my comment about how commercial airliners were perfect bombs, because of all the fuel they carried. When the towers went down, I got the weirdest look from him…
We didn’t teach much that day.
When I couldn’t take any more of the news coverage, I looked for something- anything- else on TV. I found The Lion in Winter, a movie I like, and watched that.
I was doing my medical acting internship at the VA. I had been on call the whole weekend before, so they gave me that Tuesday off.
I woke up about 8:00 and got online; I had a dialup connection at the time. I started a bunch of stuff downloading via Audiogalaxy and went back to bed. I got up late in the morning, read a book, filled up the CD changer, and set about cleaning my apartment. Later I took another nap.
It was about 3:30 before I got on the Dope, where I found lots of weird messages asking NYC Dopers to check in. I went to Yahoo News, where I became pretty much the last person in America to know what had happened. (When I got offline, I found my girlfriend had left me a message telling me I should probably turn on my TV.)
The weird thing is that there have been few days, before or since, when I’ve been so totally unplugged from the media grid.
I made pancakes for dinner. It was comfort food and it was simple. Kind of like this Onion article.
Hours earlier, after the second tower fell, I went out to the smoke shop. While waiting for them to open, I hung around with the retirees at the bagel shop and listened to their anecdotes about Pearl Harbor and the JFK assassination. One of the men said his parents were strict Methodists, which meant no radio on the Sabbath. As such, on 12/7/41, they went next door to hear the news. Not cheating because it wasn’t their radio.
But mostly, I was here, on SDMB. I’ve saved the relevant thread, but even without it, I remember the rumors flying: car bomb in front of the State Office Building, fire on the Mall, fire at the White House. All unfounded, as was our fear that vix had died in the WTC. I spent far less time looking at TV than I did on the net. Figured that posting and reading in real time was more “in the moment” than watching the towers fall over and over and over again. When I did turn on the TV, though, I was struck by the fact that every single channel, with the sole exception of shopping networks, which I assume are run by bots and can’t go live, was devoted to the attacks. Absolutely every channel.
Also, I remember that someone bumped an erotica thread that afternoon, which was immediately locked. Don’t remember who it was, but I could only figure they were really, really drunk or high. Or just in shock.
ETA: And I remember a lot of people saying that they could not get on the CNN site. BBC was suggested as an alternative.
That was a strange day. I was working in operations for an airfreight company and had already checked for weather problems. One of the agents turned around and asked me if I wanted to hear something funny (strange). She said a little twin engine plane just hit the WTC and it’s burning. I told her you couldn’t accidentally hit the tallest building in the world on a clear day and that it was likely an act of war. Everybody looked at me like I was a loon.
Chaos ensued at work and I didn’t get anything done. We had to deal with the diversion of aircraft. After work I couldn’t think of anything else to do so I drove to the Red Cross downtown to donate blood. That’s where I heard 4 sonic booms. It was the result of 2 sets of 2 aircraft dispatched to chase a plane down (as reported).
While I was there I got invited to fly supplies to NY as part of a relay (right seat). My flight was the middle leg so I didn’t go into the NY area. It was a pretty strange flight because there was no radio traffic. The controllers either wouldn’t answer our call or they challenged us. At one point I dialed in the wrong frequency and they seemed pretty irate. Twice we had to call to the previous center to relay our intentions by landline to the next one. Got back home about 7:30 in the morning. Even though I was exhausted I had trouble sleeping because I missed all the evening news reports.
If someone had told me every aircraft in the United States would be grounded due to an aerial attack of the Pentagon, a major city, and possibly the White House I would have laughed in their face. The really odd part of this is something I didn’t think about until weeks later. I had a recurring dream for at least 10 years that the United States was in a land war (like the movie Red Dawn) and that I flew courier flights. In the dream my company went out of business (which it did shortly after 9/11).
The reality of it was more bizarre than anything I could dream of.
I was living outside of Philly, in an apartment with a home office. I got up that morning, made coffee, walked over to my computer, fired up the Dope, saw a thread in GQ titled something like “Did a Plane Just Crash Into the World Trade Center?”, turned on the TV to the CBS station, and less than a minute later saw the second plane hit the towers. I left a phone message for my sister, slipped a blank tape into the VCR, and watched the coverage for the next several hours, while reading commentary on the SDMB. Didn’t really get any work done that day.
I parked my car in Hoboken and had to decide whether to take the Path train to WTC or to 33rd. 33rd is more walking and WTC is closer to the subway so I took the WTC Path. I walked through the shopping concourse and up the escalators at 5 WTC, la-de-da, and caught a subway at City Hall, about 5 minutes walk. At the next stop a woman announced that a plane had struck the WTC. Gravity descended on the car and nobody said a word. I figured it was a little Cessna or something and there’d be a tail sticking out the window. I thought I’ve gotta see this and figured I’d get off at the next stop and see what’s going on, but no, I was going to be late for a meeting and I stayed on the train, clueless.
I watched the collapse of the towers in a conference room and shortly after went to pick up my sister, who is in a wheelchair outside the lobby of her office building, and push her home a few blocks south. I stayed there a couple of hours then walked the 50 or so blocks home, under the 59th street bridge covered with people walking home, fighter jets overhead, what the hell is this?
I was in 11th grade and after band class this guy Sean told me a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon and we were under attack. My response was “BullShit”, little did I know of course. My next class was Latin and the teacher was a really old woman and she wouldn’t let us watch the news. I’ll never forgive her for that. In all my other classes that day we just watched the news and talked about it. When I got home I was glued to the tv and would be for weeks.
Sorry, I have not read the rest of the thread, just answering the OP.
I work in downtown Washington D.C.
My mother called me and told me what happened in NY. Internet is full, nothing available.
I was a smoker at the time and went out to burn one. I saw the smoke rising from the Pentagon. I just did not know where it was from at the time.
I go back upstairs and we, the Deaprtment of Justice, were going home. News says that the Pentagon was hit. Quick check of co-workes says, "X’s fiance works at the Pentagon. Not good.
We all head home, stopping for lunch at a sub shop hours later thanks to a co-worker who offers rides. TV in the sub shop shows collapse of the Twin Towers. Bad. Like no food bad. but I need a drink.
Coke, just coke.
Bad traffic, long lines at each light. Finally get a signal on the cell. BIL who works in Manhattan is OK. It’s bad, but all the family checks in. I think we are fine. Finally arive home. Wife, family, friends, everybody in the DC area calls in as OK.
Day 2 and the government (and contractor me) is expected back at work. We learn that out co-worker who has an SO that the Pentgon is reporting she is ok. I relax. Bad move.
I get a call, check the National Geographic website.
I log on and check.
The site reports that two employees were on the flight that went into the Pentagon. I was only a few months removed, could it be somebody I knew?
Yep. I was an IT rep, and we had areas we dealt with. Both of the folks that died on that plane had been my main contacts for their area.
I cried then, I am crying now. Someday, i won’t cry.
…was hiking Mt. Whitney. I had been up once before, but it was my girlfriend’s first attempt. We hit the trail well before dawn. When we got to the trail crest, it began to hail just a bit, and there were some nasty clouds heading our way. I told her that I thought we should turn back, and she burst into tears, saying all of her training had been wasted. Passers-by on the trail looked at us and wondered what I had done to her.
I gave in and we started to the summit again. Then someone on the way down told us it was snowing up at the top. We were prepared for inclement weather, but I wasn’t going to risk either one of us getting hypothermia or worse. As much as she was disappointed, I was more concerned for her safety. The mountain wasn’t going anywhere, we could always come back.
We drove down to Lone Pine to get a shower and a burger, and that’s when we found out. We sat there in the Mt. Whitney Restaurant and stared numbly at the TV coverage. The events in NYC put our failure to summit in perspective, that’s for sure.
I was a junior in college. Woke up, friend told me on IM to turn on the news, heard about the first plane hitting, and went to class. In class our professor kept us for about 15 minutes but let us go early because her husband was in NY trying to get home.
Spent the rest of the day at the union.
Well, I was at (high) school until 2:00pm, where there was a general awareness that something had occurred, but nobody knew the details and what little was known was passed around like rumor. All in all, the day progressed as usual. Afterwards, I went home and watched the TV (no need to say “the news”–every channel was covering it).
Here I could lie and say I felt something beyond ordinary empathy for those involved, but honestly, after an hour or so, I was done with it and moved on. Really, I felt no personal connection to the event then and I still don’t now. I don’t recall exactly what I did that evening–certainly no more TV, but I probably read a bit, puttered around online, homework, did ordinary things and life went on.
It was my first year of teaching, the second week. I had moved out to a tiny desert town in far east San Diego county. The computer in my classroom had an Internet connection, and I’d logged on to the Straight Dope to read a bit before classes started. In the BBQ Pit, there was a thread damning Osama bin Laden to Hell for his attack on the WTC. I remember reading it, puzzled, thinking “wasn’t that back in '92 or '93? Isn’t it a bit late to be this angry?” I stopped and checked the dates of the posts. All were from that day, that morning.
My classroom had a TV with cable and only four or five channels, but one of them was CNN. I turned it on and saw footage of, I think, the second plane hitting. I remember wondering what on Earth I should do. I called my parents and got my dad, who is old enough to remember Pearl Harbor. Then, I went to the office and told my coworkers.
I think most of us kept the TV on for at least half the day. The students, middle and high school, were mostly very worried. Would the terrorists attack us over in California? No, I said. Our town was too small to matter to them. If they hit San Diego, I explained, even with a nuclear weapon, the mountains would protect us. Would there be a war? I told them that it was probably a terrorist named Osama bin Laden, that he had a group called al Qaeda, and that I’d read al Qaeda hung out with the Taliban in Afghanistan. If anything, I said, we would probably go into Afghanistan to deal with them.
I cried at my desk over lunch, I think. For the people who’d died, for the people who’d lost someone, for the people who’d been in the middle of all of it. The next day, most of the teachers, including myself, turned the TVs off and went back to instruction. I had one student, a very messed up girl, who protested that she wanted the TV back on so she could socialize and visit. It took a lot of restraint on my part not to unload on her.
I know that I kept track of the happenings on the Straight Dope, and that Cartooniverse’s post wrung my heart out. I went home to my parents that weekend and took comfort from them.
I was at my job in a corporate office in Ann Arbor, MI. Our top performing store was located in WTC bldg 5 – it was successfully evacuated of all our staff but the building manager was killed somehow. They sent us home about 10:30 (I don’t think we knew yet that no employee lives were lost). I trolled the internet all afternoon trying to find out more from sources that were not crashed from too many hits. At about 7 I wanted to get away from it, so I watched The History Channel all night; virtually the only basic cable channel NOT broadcasting continuous WTC coverage.
In related news, I went to high school about 4 blocks north of the WTC site; I was in English class during the 1993 bombing, which shook our building but did not damage it significantly.
The two planes crashed at 8:46 and 9:03, seventeen minutes apart. CNN reported the first crash at 8:49. The second crash was seen live on CNN and all the other networks.