what were you doing on September 11th, 2001?
It was the one day of the school week I wasn’t in class at grad school. My mom came and woke me up because she didn’t want to watch it by herself.
I was at work when someone wandered through the office and mentioned that a plane had flown into the WTC. Everyone thought it was a little puddlejumper or something, then a little bit later we got the real news. Someone brought a little 13-inch TV in and we watched the news coverage for a while. Then we had a meeting and were told we could go home for the day if we felt unsafe. I went, because there was a huge oil storage tank complex across the street from the place I worked and nobody knew right then if there were more attacks coming or not.
It just seemed so unreal at the time. Nobody actually understood what was happening until the second plane hit. We thought it was a navigational failure or something.
It was early afternoon and I was working at a newspaper in Budapest when the initial reports came in over the Bloomberg wires about the first plane hitting the towers. We followed along on the internet, just assuming it was some small private airplane or commuter jet, having no idea of the enormity of the situation, when the second plane hit. Then, we knew something was up, and all hell broke loose. I tried calling my friends in New York to no success, rumors were flying around of the Sears Tower being targeted, at some point the Pentagon was hit, there was the flight going down in Pennsylvania, etc (which we all initially assumed was shot down by the US). I really don’t remember the sequence of events, just drinking a lot after that.
Moving to IMHO.
Colibri
General Questions Moderator
I had just woken up, was going to head into work (was editing my movie). Turned on the internet. excite.com was my homepage at the time, and I got the news there. “Planes hit World Trade Center, towers collapse”. My initial reaction? “Huh, someone’s hacked excite.com and put up fake news”. My brain just couldn’t register that it could possibly be true.
What was I doing when I heard Osama Bin Laden was killed? Surfing internet porn. I may need to prepare a better story…
I was at the gym. When the news broke about the first plane, every TV was tuned to news stations and everybody’s attention was fixed on the screens. When the second hit, the place emptied out in just a few minutes.
In school, in fifth grade. We moved from class to class as scheduled, but every class was watching the news.
I was flying to Culver City for Jeopardy! try-outs. Studying the monarchs of England, in fact.
Arriving at my job in Westchester County. I was checking a theater site (boss wasn’t in yet, but he was home watching TV) and my friend James Marino wrote “Something terrible has happened at the WTC.” By the time I found a news site, the second plane had hit and the world had changed. Boss came in, we all watched for a couple of hours on his big-screen office TV, then dispersed home. I went back to the Bronx and saw emergency vehicles converging from all over at Yonkers Raceway, a staging area before they raced down to Lower Manhattan, as I passed it on the Deegan. I went to my parent’s neighborhood and retrieved them from the public school where they were working on Election Day–the primary had been ordered cancelled, the voting materials were thrown in containers and locked up, and we went to a neighborhood bar and had a lunch in near-silence, watching the TVs that usually showed Irish soccer and Yankee games. Boss cancelled work for a couple of days and I joined the TV zombie crowd.
BTW, work slowed down so much that the boss laid me off. Job-hunting along with a million other people in post-9/11 New York, so much fun.
My stepdad picked me up for work that morning, asked me if I’d heard the news yet. He told me terrorists had flown jetliners into the World Trade Center towers. I had a :eek: moment, followed closely by: “Holy shit! Terrorists have been reading Tom Clancy novels!”
There was almost nothing happening at work that day. I dispatched central-office phone techs then. All our guys were ordered to stay where they were until things had become more clear. It was creepy being in a silent office space that was usually very busy.
Working. Wondering why I couldn’t get to CNN on the internet.
I slept through the whole thing. I woke up, looked out my window and saw this giant plume of smoke. I though "Damn there must be a serious fire in Adams Morgan. I left my house and some older black guy passed me muttering about “crazy people blowing everything up.” Well, somebody’s crazy I thought. I Turned on to Mt. Pleasant street and everyone’s got their phone out. I figured out what’s going on, and went back home. I invited the maintanence man to my apartment and we watched the news for about three hours.
The giant plume of smoke I thought was an apartment fire about ten blocks away was coming from the Pentagon, all the way in Virginia.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention that I went up on the roof of my building that afternoon and looked at the huge plume of gray and black smoke coming from lower Manhattan, 15 miles away. It was unreal, reaching as far as the Empire State Building if the wind was right. There were also no planes in the sky except for fighter jets coming in from Stewart Field upstate and the ANG base on Long Island.
Little bro actually was an ANG mechanic up on Stewart Field and, after their fighters took off, they helped the adjacent civilian airport out as planes came down and were parked nose to tail for hours. They organized food and and medical care. He didn’t get home for three days.
It was very late evening here in Aus, and I had fallen asleep in front of the television. I awoke with a bit of a start to see an aeroplane flying in to one of the towers, but being still half-asleep, assumed it was a surreal dream. :rolleyes:
But I had a vague recollection in the morning, and turned the telly back on to see the attacks in all their horrific glory…woke the kids and we sat there for the WHOLE DAY watching the atrocities unfold.
Never forget.
September 11, 2001 was my second fucking wedding anniversary. My then-wife and and I were not the sort to let events rain on our parade, but candle-light vigils do put a damper on a weekend in Reno.
Osama: mazel tov, you prick.
Similar for me. It was the first day of grad school - in fact, we had an orientation activity to attend that morning so I was up early. My sister called and said a small plane had hit the WTC - in fact, we were certain it was a Piper Cub kind of deal. Turned the TV on to see the second plane it.
Many of us showed up in the library and just cried and tried to support each other. Being in Cambridge, we knew that morning one of the planes had left from Logan. The university president called a convocation at the chapel that afternoon… I remember walking to Harvard Yard a few feet behind David Gergen, who I’m watching on CNN right now.
Man. I can’t imagine how the families of those murdered under bin Laden’s orders feel right now. I hope this gives them some closure and a sense that justice has been served.
I was asleep. It was my day off so I slept in.
I was pregnant with my first baby, in Seattle. My mom called and woke me up at about 6 am Pacific time to tell me I should turn the news on.
I didn’t turn it off again for a week.
As I left my apartment in Panama City the janitor told me some big building in New York had been blown up. I asked him which one but he said he didn’t know.
As I drove in to work I passed by the US Embassy to see it surrounded by security guards and really began to wonder what was up.
When I got to work, I found everyone clustered around a TV in an office behind the reception area and saw the WTC was in flames.
My brother had been working in WTC 7 a few months earlier. I thought his office had relocated, but wasn’t sure. I tried to call my family in New York, but it was impossible to get through. Finally after about an hour I reached my sister-in-law in one of the suburbs, who told me she had heard from my brother and he was OK.
As it turned out, my brother was working a few blocks away. He came out of the subway next to the WTC just after the first plane hit. He went in to his office on Wall Street before the second hit, where he stayed until the early afternoon, when they let people go home. He had to walk up to 51st St to get a subway home.
My mother had been on a bus trip to Atlantic City and it took us a while to locate her, but she eventually made it home OK.
A couple of my brothers worked for NYC, for the subway and sanitation, and ended up working on the cleanup on the site for the first couple of days until it was turned over to other agencies.