“It’s a Hell of a day to wake up American…”
I was at work. While the attacks were happening, I was on a ferry commuting to Seattle.
I got to the office and none of us did anything but watch the news on the TV in the conference room, trying to deal with it.
I forget what prompted me, something I’d read online perhaps, but I turned the TV on a little after 6am Arizona time after the first strike but before the second. With what little I know about steel as a material and how it can be weakened from heat I said to myself, “That building is coming down.”
My route to work included about 20 minutes running parallel to and offset from the prevailing downwind leg to Sky Harbor airport and I was quite used to watch plane after plane pass me as they came in to land. That morning there were none and it was quite eerie.
I was at work, and we didn’t have any TVs, but we did have Internet access. I told me staff to take the rest of the day off (why pretend we would get any work done) and spent the morning scouring the Internet, until i could catch a train home. Then i watched TV until elementary school let out, and turned it off before i picked up my kids. I told the kids what happened, but i didn’t want them to see the images, which were pretty horrific, and i thought might be hard for small children (5 and 7) to interpret.
It was really hard to filter Google results for “today”. I’m sure it wasn’t a coincidence that Google News was released shortly thereafter.
I was on my honeymoon in Australia. I’d gotten up and turned on the news which was showing some bombed out building that was obviously in the Middle-East, then Giuliani was on the screen. I had no idea why that dip-shit was opining on some random bombing in the Middle-East. When they finally rolled the tape of the planes hitting the buildings, we were shocked.
I heard about it just as I was getting on the freeway to go to work – also a bit after 6:00 am. I went to the cafeteria when I got there because they had big flat screens TVs, so that’s where people were gathering.
I live very near LAX, and it was really weird to hear no planes for weeks (it was weeks, wasn’t it?).
I saw the fire from the first one on my way to work. The fire and smoke hid alot, but everyone on the train was talking about how it looked like a chunk of the building was missing. And then the 2nd one hit just as I got to Times Square. Most colleagues went home but I stuck around all day. I never saw Times Square as emply as I did that evening. Very eerie and surreal. Weird thing was trains were operating normally, so I was on an extremely rare empty rush hour commuter train.
World Trade Center Plane Crash (posted 11 September 2001)
I was wrong about the airplane (post #2), but it was an unfolding event.
I registered in the SDMB to post in similar threads, (I thought it was that one but a quick search shows that I didn’t post in that thread)
I was lurking then, and experienced the day with you guys, though you didn’t know it.
It was my mom’s birthday, and we met at the local pancake house for brunch. Everyone in the restaurant was conversing together as if we were at the same table.
The point of the 9/11 tangent is that back then most news and discussion websites were completely overloaded by everyone trying to get news, so now anytime a website is slow loading, we hope maybe it’s other big news.
There was recently a Radiolab episode which uses that exact 9/11 internet failure to introduce a story about why (at least major sites) don’t have that problem today.[1], with the Radiolab twist of it being inspired by honeybee behavior.
So unlike that morning when websites would load enough to see something big had happened, but it wasn’t clear what, and I finally remembered to turn on the TV, when the next something big happens, we’ll find out about it easily.
Dynamically scaling resources based on what exactly is in demand. ↩︎
I was on a cruise ship 1 day out of Vancouver en route to the Alaskan coast and fjords. It was a weird time to be on a holiday cruise with all that drama going on!
When we got to Anchorage we were the last one in and no one could leave, how they accommodated us and the previous several ships’ passengers I don’t know. There were fighter jets circling over the town 24/day for 2 or 3 days, until we could leave.
Apparently there were folks stranded in the Alaska wilderness for days; they’d been flown in by seaplane to a lake for fishing, with an agreed pickup time which was of course not met. No mobile phones so I guess they had no idea what was going on!
I was at the barn where I boarded my horse, waiting for my instructor to come give me a lesson that morning. She drove in late, blurted the news, we agreed there’d be no lesson that day, and on the way home I bought a television (hadn’t had one for years) to follow whaat was happening.
The silence of the sky, with no planes headed to and from Logan Airport a dozen or so miles south of me, was extraordinary.
It was while I was caring for my mother, who had fairly advanced alzheimers then. I hadn’t bothered to turn on a radio or tv, was just working through the getting mom up, toileted, cleaned, dressed routine. She’d had her bedside tv on, she always did, and I’d ignored it as I generally did, and she was telling me in an addled way about planes ramming into buildings and I was just sort of going “Uh-huh, that’s so sad. Lift your arms, please. So what happened next?” assuming I was hearing about a dream she’d had or maybe the mangled version of some late night movie she’d watched.
I was totally shocked when I helped her back to her chair in her bedroom (where she’d eat breakfast after I made it) and I suddenly realized the tv was showing the footage and it was real.
Weird twist to my 9/11 experience… I was planning to visit a friend in San Francisco, but my flight was on September 12.
As you might guess, it was cancelled. When I asked the airline if I could reschedule the trip, they said they had no idea when any flights would be allowed again, so I just didn’t ever go.
As frustrating as that sounds, imagine being (literally) on the other side of the world and having no idea when you would be allowed to come home. On the bright side, Oz was a much more affordable place to get stuck in than, say, LA.
Oof, I’m sorry.
Mrs Magill joked (?) that we were only one day away from looking at houses.
9-11 stories are not my favorite subject ( even though my ex- SIL managed to twist it all around to say, “Well, you landed on your feet like a cat” ) . I’m not going to devolve this into that since the US is re: Iran squarely at fault and is trying to whip up anti muslim sentiment to cover up the fact that Trump likes raping little boys and girls.
If Trump and his MAGAts are like to die, they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population.
( that’s a mis-quote, so no quotes )
Not to interrupt everybody’s reminiscing, but here’s a description of trump from three weeks ago:
Late this afternoon, after a weekend largely out of public view, President Trump re-emerged aboard Air Force One as it flew back to Washington. He walked into the press cabin with one arm completely limp at his side and the other hovering awkwardly over his hip. His eyes looked heavy, and there was a blank stare across his face. He looked like he had just woken up and was being forced to talk to the press. As he reached up to steady himself on the door frame, he launched into a rehearsed monologue about the economy before the press pool could ask a single question.
And another one from yesterday:
He had just wrapped up remarks at the Republican Members Issues Conference, conveniently held just steps away. As he moved from one room to the next, his movements were noticeably heavy, his mouth hung open, his lips parted tight, pulling in shallow breaths between each step. His hair was also visibly streaked with his signature orange foundation, which had pooled at his hairline and dusted across the top of his scalp.