Was sitting in a cafe in Salzburg, when I got a text from my sister with the news. I was a week into backpacking around Europe.
We had just got our coffees, which had the chocolate sprinkles on them in a heart stencil…so that’s my 9/11 mental image, a cup of coffee with chocolate sprinkles in a heart shape.
We went back to the hostel (the Yoho) and everyone who had people in NY was madly phoning home. Everyone seemed to be OK. The bartender’s girlfriend was cabin crew and she was working in the USA…she was fine, and he opened the bar early.
We all did about the only thing that made any sense at the time and proceeded to drink the bar dry. Come 1am the bartender was dancing on the bar, I had learned how to hand roll cigarettes and most of us were singing. It was surreal, but it made a bad day bearable.
I didn’t watch TV.
When we got to Budapest 4 days later, there was a TV in the hostel and lots of people were glued to it, I watched 5 minutes, decided it wasn’t going to change anything, and went out to enjoy the city.
I grew up in Northern Ireland, where getting blown up while doing a bit of shopping in town was a real possibility for much of my childhood. 9/11 did not shatter my view of the world, it was just another very bad thing, like a hurricane or the Rwandan genocide or a big earthquake. It was sad and shocking and difficult to understand, but I didn’t suddenly feel any less safe or feel that I should curtail my life in any way because of it.
I was at work when a colleague told me they’d been told by a client about the first plane, then another colleague told me they’d heard from a different client about the second.
My mind was trying to take all this in, while there was the background noise in my thoughts of an article I’d read, 2 days before, in a national newspaper about how super-tall buildings hold tens of thousands of people. The WTC was one of the buildings it focussed on, and it highlighted how 1000s of those occupants are non-US citizens, with many Brits making up a part of the workforce.
So I made some dumb excuse to speak to another colleague in an office with a tv in the relaxation area, and got there just in time to see the first building fall.
That night was spent in front of the tv at home; BBC News, CNN, Bloomberg et al.
I was heading out the door to work when I found my parents and whatever sibs still lived at home in front of the TV. My mom said, “Somebody crashed a plane into one of the Twin Towers!” As I stood there watching, with my purse in my hand, the second tower was hit. To me it seemed surreal, like something out of an action movie. I went to work anyway, and as Mr. Lucky and I were driving up the freeway to my office, the realization of the whole thing hit me. I could barely hold it together all day, and the fact that I was 7 months pregnant, about to bring a child into this entirely different world, wasn’t helping. My coworkers spent the day gathered around whatever radios were available. Not much got done that day. I don’t remember what I did when I got home, maybe I just slept because I was always so tired on account of being pregnant. A week later I spoke to a coworker from Taiwan whose BIL worked at the WTC. Fortunately, the BIL was visiting relatives in Taiwan at the time of the attacks.
It was my junior year in high school. My boyfriend saw me in the hallway between second and third hour and told me that a plane had crashed into the Pentagon. “Yeah right,” I said, and kept moving. I walked into my third hour and the TV was on with teachers and students gathered around. We watched for the rest of class, and it was about half an hour in when I realized.
My dad is in NYC.
“Wait,” says I, “The phone would ring if something was wrong.”
So the phone rings and my teacher says, “Amazingrace, it’s for you.” It was a secretary letting me know that my mom had called and my dad was on one of the last planes cleared to land in the US. My brother got the worse end… two assistant principles knocked on the door and took him out in the hallway to tell him… everything is fine.
For the rest of the day we just watched the news, until my final class (US History). We took a test. Our teacher figured that we had had enough coverage for the day, which I understand. It probably was for the best.
We had a tennis match later that day. I don’t think that any of the area high school sports were canceled. My dad made it in time for my match. We played near an airport, which was strange because there were no planes in the sky.
It was really on the first anniversary that it hit me. I didn’t get out of bed until noon even though it was a school day. I don’t really know how to explain it.
I spent the day alternately on the Dope, watching the tv in the office, doing the work that needed to be done while having to work around the folks that came into our office to watch the tv, and trying to comfort those who weren’t coping too well with the news. Then I came home and watched some more with my husband.
I was living in Vancouver BC at the time, in a neighbourhood with a clear view to the airport. My memory of 9/11 is my roommate knocking on my window to wake me up, yelling “Come out here, come out here!” (she was on her way to work). I wandered outside in my pyjamas and saw the vast expanse of the ashphalt around the airport just covered with planes. More planes were circling overhead, and at least 6 planes were decending on to the various available runways. I guess they were the Asian flights diverted to Canada.
Man, that was one weird image. I’ve never seen so many planes at once. Having just woken up and not knowing what the hell was going on made it all so surreal. Definitely something I will not forget.
Then I spent a few hours watching TV, and I really don’t remember what the hell else I did.
8AM EDT is 9PM here, so when the attacks occurred I was sitting in an empty commuter train heading home from work. At the time I lived downtown and taught in the suburbs, so my commute was opposite the daily rush.
When I got home (which would have been around 10:30PM), my wife was frantically calling me into the living room to see the TV where the WTC was in flames. At first I thought it was an accidental crash until I finally sorted out that there had been two planes in NY, another one at the Pentagon. I watched for a little bit, went to the Straight Dope and started reading the now-famous thread to see what was going on. I talked on the phone with a friend in Tokyo who was also watching CNN.
Then I suddenly remembered: my parents were supposed to be flying out of Boston, but I couldn’t recall if it was that day or the next. When I called them up, they said they were still getting ready for their flight that afternoon. They’d heard something on the radio about a crash in New York but had no idea what was going on.
The next day I went to work as usual. My students were all a bit stunned, but we certainly didn’t have any shortage of things to discuss. Nobody I knew personally died in the attacks or had any direct experience with it.
I was playing golf with my brother - when we arrived the TV in the clubhouse was showing pictures saying the towers had been hit, but we didn’t give it more than a quick glance.
By the time we’d finished the round the towers had fallen, we watched a few mins of the news and then went to the pub.
I didn’t know what the WTC actually was, or that it was 2 x jumbo jets that crashed, so the scale of the disaster didn’t relate.
I was doing printer testing at the time. I started work at 6:00 AM local time, which was 8:00 AM on the east coast. As always, I checked the local news site first thing before getting into my work. At the time nothing unusual had been reported. Fast forward to 8:00 AM (10:00 AM EDT). A guy I was helping to get up to speed on testing came in at that time. The first thing he asked me was, “Have you seen the news?” I replied, “Umm… yeah, why?”, not having seen anything out of the ordinary reported last I checked. He had the dubious honor of being the first to tell me of the horrible events that had just transpired. I tried to go back to the news site but traffic was so busy the connection to the site timed out. Throughout the day I managed to get updates through other people, some of whom had radios in their cubicles and sometimes I could get through to a news site.
While I stayed through my shift it was really hard to get much of anything done. In fact, I don’t think anyone got much of anything accomplished that day. I listened to a news feed on the rock station I normally listen to on the drive home and then I stayed glued to my TV for the rest of the day, leaving in the early evening to go talk to my mom and dad about the tragic turn of events. I called my friends to talk to them about the situation. Being due to take a flight on the 22 of September, I was in doubt as to whether or not the airports would be opened back up by then. Fortunately they were, but I could definitely sense a different feeling amongst other travelers when I got on the plane.
I went to work. I had graduated from college but because I was an aimless moocher at the time, I was living with my parents in Northern California and working in a bookstore. Because of the time lag, my parents, whose alarm clock was tuned to a clock radio, knew what was going on immediately. They waited for my own alarm to go off, and my mom immediately ran in and pulled me out to watch TV. We sat and watched CNN together.
I remember feeling so confused and angry that everything was so normal. It was a really nice day, 3,000 miles from New York or Washington. I think it wasn’t until later that people realized that one of the hijacked jets (United 93) was headed for SFO, so a lot of those passengers turned out to be local to those of us in NoCal, which, for me anyway, sort of “made it real”.
The bookstore was pretty dead, except for people asking when the news supplement would show up. I remember receiving a new shipment of books. I had to write in the date on the shipment order, and I kept looking at the date I had just written and hating it because I knew that 9/11/01 would be memorable and I didn’t want to be there anymore.
When I got home, I read the SDMB - I remember being incredibly touched by the posts from people overseas. I specifically remember read an Australian Doper write that they had driven by a school and saw, flying under the Australian flag, the American flag. Extremely touching.
I’m a baker, in the Central Time Zone here in the US, and I was already at work since 5:45AM CDT. The cafe I work for is in the city’s public library. MY boss came in, apparently he hadn’t heard about it. Then his assistant, the kitchen manager, arrived and said he’d heard a plane had crashed into the WTC. This guy could say anything with a straight face and make you believe it, so I told him “Bernard, that is a sick joke”. But he insisted it was true. There were TV’s under hush hoods out in the library, so we went there. The hoods had been turned off so everyone could hear. The library wasn’t open yet, but by the time it was the staff had set up a table with books and maps about the WTC and the New York City area. They kept the TV’s on, without the hoods, the only time that’s been done, to my knowledge. Nobody complained. When I got off work I went home and turned on the TV, and pretty much watched stuff over and over. For the next two days, when I went to work, I put a blank VHS tape in to record news, don’t know why. I still have those tapes somewhere.
I sat stunned for a while watching the TV then I started getting my army shit together. My wife didn’t say a word. I drove to the armory and waited with the rest of my company but didn’t get the call. I was a shame because we could have reached the area quicker than most of the New York National Guard. We were activated a few weeks later for bridge and tunnel security. It was a few days before I heard that my cousin was one of the FDNY that didn’t make it.
It was very unreal to drive on the Garden State Parkway and basically be the only one on the road. The smoke from Ground Zero was very visible. The toll Booth collectors waved me straight through without paying which I took as a sure sign of the apocalypse .
I was in Columbus, Ohio. I went to work at the standardized testing site that I worked at. Someone came into our room and mentioned what had happened. I remember thinking of Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor. In fact, I think I shouted it out.
Went to my friend’s home when they let us out of work that day. Went to a restaurant that night to watch Mr. Bush’s news conference.
I was at home in California, just sipping my coffee. Didn’t have to work until the afternoon. I never watch TV during the day and I honestly don’t remember how I found out. It could have been the internet, or maybe my neighbor who does watch the TV all the time, came by to tell me.
I turned on the TV and started watching. The first tower, then the second tower. The Pentagon. Possibly planes all over the US. Then I heard fighter jets overhead. That’s not that unusual, but on that day it all became clear; we’re at war. We’ve actually, finally been attacked right here on our soil and we’re at war. My roommate who was still active duty Army at the time came home mid-morning to alert me, but I already had the TV on.
I had friends back east who live near the Pentagon, and a couple who work at the Pentagon, so that personalized it a bit more for me. Luckily, no one I knew personally was killed.
Later that day all the stores at the local mall closed for the day, except for Macy’s. I haven’t shopped at Macy’s since. Of course, I didn’t like Macy’s that much anyway, but that gave me my excuse to officially never shop there again.
I was working across the street from Ft Meade that day. I remember being a little POed that morning because I couldn’t pull up my normal news web pages. Once I did, It still didn’t register. I thought a small plane, or a tragically misguided puddle hopper had hit a tower. I did see the live video feed of the second plane and just wondered what the hell I’d seen. Shortly after the penatgon got hit, I decided that it just didn’t make sense to be where I was, and I went home. The school system, to it’s credit, did a reasonably efficient job of getting the kids home. I really struggled with how to talk to them about the day, and what had happened. They were 11 and 8 at the time, so it was pretty tough to try to explain.
I was in bed sleeping at the GF’s (at the time) when my sister called from California (Im in AK). Her first words were: “a plane hit the twin towers” I said "what are the twin towers?" (Duh) She got annoyed and said"* turn the TV on*" I turned on the tube just in time to see the second plane hit.
It was a moment of shock to say the least
I got on the phone immediatly to my Dads cell. He works at an oil refinery and myself not yet knowing what the Hell was going on and wether whoever did this would start attacking infrustructures. I told him not to go to work today,he didn’t know what was going on yet but he heard the concern and trembling in my voice (I was very worried about him) Without asking why he said: “OK Im turning around now”
We spent the rest of the day on the phone to relatives and friends and watching the news…