At work, like many people. An engineering office. We had a tv/vcr in the conference room for training purposes but no one had ever turned it on to watch real tv. Well a co-worker got word via telephone about the first plane, so we turned on the tv. No reception. (We worked 70 miles from nearest tv station.)
We had a bunch of engineers trying to manufacture a makeshift antenna for the tv.
I was in my dorm room getting ready to go to class and saw the news headlines. I went to class anyway, where the professor was messing with a TV in the room. When he couldn’t get it working, he was going to just teach class, until a student ran down and said one of the towers had collapsed. Everyone ran down to the TV in the lobby of the building and watched until after the second tower collapsed. We went home after that.
I was at work in Manhattan, on Hudson and Houston, not far from the towers. My wife was also at work in the city, further uptown, and after we were cleared to leave our building (our bathrooms were flooding) I walked to her office and we walked to the Hudson river and waited a few hours to get on a ferry back to the NJ side. I’ll never forget seeing armed soldiers walking the streets of NYC. I know it’s not uncommon in other places in the world, but it was pretty strange to see it there.
We were hiking Mt Whitney. We didn’t summit because of the weather; my friend had been training all summer for the hike, she was in tears when I made the decision to turn around. We found out about the attack as we were driving into town to get a shower and some dinner. After that, not making it to the top didn’t seem so very important.
I was at work in Philly. We usually don’t have a radio or anything on in the lab, so we had no idea until my mom called and said a plane had hit the WTC. I immediately turned on a news station and we heard as things escalated.
By 11 am, the university advised everyone to go home. I was in the middle of an 8 hr experiment that was a huge PITA and I didn’t want to have to start again. I didn’t want to leave. A couple of us who were in the middle of things decided to stay. My boyfriend called and said he was getting a ride home by a co-worker and he was too scared to take the train home. By noon security came up and said it was now mandatory evacuation. I didn’t want to take public transportation, so another person in the lab drove me home.
My brother-in-law is a pilot for American who flew Miami-NYC, so at first we were worried it might have been one of his planes. We were happy to hear he was safe.
I spent the rest of the day in front of the TV and phoning people. My relatives in Toronto called and said they were all sent home from work as well. No one was taking any chances that they would be hit.
It was totally surreal. If it had happened a year earlier (2000), we would have been staying in the Marriot WTC for a friend’s wedding. My husband (then-boyfriend) had a trial scheduled for Federal Court in NYC on Sept 11th 2001 that got pushed back for various reasons. He normally stayed at the Marriot WTC for those trials. At least he would have been at the courthouse when the planes hit…
His trial was rescheduled for January. I went up a couple of times to visit. It was really strange looking at ground zero knowing what was there just a few months prior.
I was on vacation that week and had just gotten out of the shower and turned on the Weather Channel. There was some kind of notice onscreen about all incoming flights being re-routed to Canada. Before I could figure out why, the phone rang and I had the follwing conversation with my mother:
“Are you watching the news?”
ME: “I just turned on the Weather Channel, why?”
HER: “WESTERN CIVILIZATION’S CRASHING DOWN AROUND YOUR FEET AND YOU DON’T EVEN KNOW ABOUT IT YET!!!2!!!”
ME: “…huh?”
HER: “WESTERN CIVILIZATION’S…”
ME: “I HEARD what you said but what the hell are you talking about?”
HER: “Just go turn on CNN!” (click)
So I turned on CNN and saw only one tower where there should have been two, and then the second tower came down. I’m not quite sure how long I just stood there in front of the TV trying to process something that couldn’t possibly be real, and yet it was all too real.
The strange thing about that day is I remember it in crystal-clear detail: what I was wearing, what I ate, the headlines in the newspaper, the weather, the umpteen phone calls from that day (my brother-in-law has family who worked at the Pentagon and my brother worked on an army base in VA). I can’t even remember yesterday clearly.
I was in my psychology class and the instructor came in and made a comment about a plane hitting one of the towers. I thought it was just some error by an inexperienced pilot but then the person sitting next to me said “They got the Pentagon too.” She had a pocket computer and kept showing me the news reports as they came in. I couldn’t believe that it was possible for the towers to fall.
The university was closed for the day. My mother was visiting me at the time and was informed by my aunt; she then called my sister, who dropped the phone and ran to get her husband, as he had relatives in NYC. I don’t think any of them were hurt. Later my mother drove from my home (in Albuquerque) to Las Vegas NV where my sister lived–her flight had been cancelled but she was determined to see my sister and my nephew. I wrote in my diary that no terrorist was going to stop my mother from seeing her grandson.
I was off that day, so I woke up about 9, and went to take my son to daycare. I knocked on the neighbor’s door and invited her to ride with me and go get coffee or something. So we go, and on the way I can’t get any music on the radio and so I turn it off. I walk into daycare with my kid, and the women in there tell me that the White House has been attacked! and oh my god we’re all gonna die!! and everyone’s freaking out. I go back out to the car and ask my neighbor if she’s heard about this, and she says, “Oh yeah, I was watching tv when it happened- I saw the whole thing.” I’m like, “What the hell? You couldn’t say something??”
I had just woken up and stepped into my home office in one of Philly’s distant suburbs. I fired up the Dope and noticed a thread concerning an airplane hitting a building in NYC. I flipped on the TV just in time to see live video of the second plane hitting the WTC. I called my sister in Lancsaster, PA and left the message, “you definitely want to turn your TV on right now!” I then popped a tape in the VCR to record the event and spent most of the rest of the day watching live coverage.
Yep, I heard it here first.
ditching class. The campus is right next to a * natural gas tank*!
What’s really getting me is that, even a decade later, descriptions of people seeing the attack on TV can still make me feel like I’m going to cry. I’ve deliberately avoided the annual memorials on TV since the day, because they make me feel the same way. 9/11 was probably the most profoundly affecting event in several generations’ lifetimes.
High school AP history class, first hour, junior year, and I had just turned 17 the day before. We were watching it on TV while it happened (thankfully I had a cool teacher and it wasn’t a test day). It’s pretty messed up, but I thought it was a hoax at first and kind of barked out an incredulous laugh (I wasn’t laughing but people thought I was, I’ve always handled the denial stage of grief in an unusual fashion though). Total flashbulb memory.
Attending law school. They didn’t cancel classes.
Now ask me what I was doing on September 11, 2001 with Bin Laden alive!
It’s pretty much the same thing.
I was at work in the morning. We were in the process of getting a new branch library ready to open, so we were closed to the public but still at work doing stuff like putting books on shelves, making signage, etc. The children’s department staff had a radio on in their workroom and so they were the first to hear about it. In short order, we had all the computers at the information desk on various news sites waiting for more news.
That afternoon, I had a appointment with an oral surgeon about the clicking noise my jaw makes. He diagnosed me with TMJ and said that when it started hurting, we could do something about it, but until then I was fine to just live with it.
I remember when driving to the appointment noticing that the sky was completely free of contrails for quite possibly the first time I had ever seen it so in Charlotte. It was eerie.
I was at Goodfellow AFB in San Angelo at the time. We locked down pretty quickly, and kind of stared blindly at the TV, almost willing it to not be true.
It’s the day I joined the SDMB, I had lurked for a while, but was blown away by the threads going on that day.
The one thing I do remember vividly was the gas prices on my way home that afternoon. they had jumped almost four dollars during the day.
I live on the west coast. Got up that morning to get ready for work, fired up my computer to check the morning news. Switched to live TV and learned that one tower had already fallen.
Stayed home from work but went ahead and kept a morning medical appointment. Since my doctor and I were friends, he didn’t have to maintain a dispassionate professional demeanor, and told me how worried he was about his brother who lived less than a block from WTC.
I called his office the next day and asked his office staff if Doc had heard anything. Yes. His brother had called late Monday to report that he and his wife had gotten the hell out of their apartment, and were a mile or two away (on foot) when the first tower collapsed.
.
neat related story: my brother provided pilot support at Otis AFB, those pilots patrolled Ground Zero in the aftermath.
I was dropping my daughter off at school when we heard the first bulletin on the car radio. Like some others said, we thought at first it was a small plane. Before I got to work the second plane had hit, and by the time I got upstairs to my office the Pentagon had been hit.
My wife was teaching at an elementary school. I called her to make sure she knew what was happening and she said “I can’t talk right now. We’re meeting to figure out what to tell the students.”
I was sitting on the couch in my college apt. since I didn’t have any early-morning classes. We had only just gotten the cable hooked up, so at first I was so busy fiddling with the unfamiliar (and complex!) remote that I didn’t notice what was actually on the TV. Took a while for it to sink in, what I was looking at. I thought at first it was news about some bombing in Bosnia or something.
While watching the drunken rabble of college students “celebrating” on the news this morning, Mr. Horseshoe pointed out that all those kids were TEN YEARS OLD when it happened. God, do I feel old now.
College. Didn’t cancel classes. My 9:15 Physics guy made us do the lesson, but my ANTHRO 101 Prof discussed the event.