When you heard a plane crashed into tower,did you think it was pilot error? Where were you and what were you doing?. Does it stick in your memory?
inb4topicismoved
A plane crashed into a tower???
ditto
Sitting in my apartment watching happen live on one of the national morning show (Good Morning America or one of the other ones). It was one of the few days I watched any TV before school. I believe I was running really late (just 5 more minutes of TV and then I’ll drive really fast), and then it happened.
My mother-in-law in a foreign country called (I slept late, as I worked afternoons then) to express her incredulity. I barely understood her at the time – what the hell are torres gemelas? Having passed the phone to my wife, she urged me to turn on the TV. Both towers had already been hit by then, and it was no doubt a terrorist activity.
BTW, I slept late the morning and didn’t get up until 11:30. I drove to Subway to get a sub and didn’t turn the TV on, nor did I have the radio on in my car. So, I didn’t find out until the people in Subway were like “we’re under attack, it’s WWIII !” I couldn’t believe it. The guy turned the radio up in Subway and I stood there dumbfounded.
I immediately went to my son’s daycare and got him, came home and watched it on TV in awe. I’ll never forget that day.
I came back home from work, evening time in Tokyo, and it was after the planes had crashed but before the Towers collapsed. I called by friend and we talked as we watched the Towers go down. Unbelievable.
I was in Vancouver BC, and at work when I caught a phone call from one of my co-workers in Toronto telling me about the attacks.
Strange day
I was playing a rare lunchtime round of golf with my brother here in the UK.
The weather in the UK was the same as New York - a glorious early autumn day, with sunshine and blue skies (hence the golf).
We kept receiving txt updates on our mobiles from another brother who was watching on his PC at work.
A Pakistani cow-orker/friend told me a plane had crashed into one of the WTC towers. I told her they’d probably blame it on the Pakistanis. At the time we thought it was a small, non-commercial plane, and had no idea what was unfolding. Initially they said something along the lines of “probably the pilot did not survive”. There’s a long, long thread about it all on the SDMB here somewhere.
I sat in my office in Bethesda (MD) when a coworker mentioned something about a plane that flew into WTC on CNN. Then something about a second plane and then that a helicopter had crashed into the White House right after take-off. But that time most of the folks in my office had gathered around radios and the cnn live-feeds in the conference rooms. That’s where I saw the towers go down.
By noon I was sitting in my friend’s car driving into DC towards the huge balck cloud that hung over the city while most folks were trying to get out. The rest of the day I just read and watch tv for updates since DC was shut down.
I happened to turn on the tv after the first plane hit, and of course had no reason to assume it was terrorism, until the second plane hit. As a former New Yorker, I had been in the World Trade Center many times, even up to the top a couple times. And my last apartment in New York had a view of the towers from my living room windows.
Then I remembered that two of my ex-coworkers worked at Cantor Fitzgerald, though I couldn’t remember which tower they were in, or which floors.
Then I got a call from another coworker, saying that nobody from Cantor Fitzgerald survived.
I was in high school. I remember leaving class 2nd period (science) and going to 3rd period (math). I was barely awake and I laid my head down on the table in my math class. I woke up and everyone was watching the tv, so I assumed it was a movie and laid back down. My classmate explained what had been going on. After that, I spent most of my day in my CFA teachers room, as most classes were not doing much anyways, and I figured it would be better to be in there and be able to discuss what was happening that to sit in a regular class and do nothing at all.
Brendon
In my office. A newspaper office, so lots of TVs around. I remember it was my first day back at work after a couple of weeks off sick. When I first became aware of people crowding round the TV, I went over to have a look, and the first image I saw was a close-up of a burning building. Because it was a close-up, there was no sense that this was 80 storeys up in the air, and I thought it was an apartment block. For some reason, I also initially got the impression that the pictures were of somewhere in Paris. I have no idea why I thought that - obviously I soon realised once they showed a different angle.
I woke up at noonish, central time (i worked 2nd shift at the time and generally went out drinking after work), and was sitting on the couch watching News Radio. I was halfway through the second episode of the day and a buddy of mine called:
Him: ‘Dude, you watching TV?’
Me: ‘Yep’
Him: ‘Totally fucked up man, totally fucked up, so are we at war or what?’
Me: ‘What?’
I to this day am amazed that the E! network didn’t say anything about what was going on in the real world while they were showing their daily sitcoms… Not that I’m bitter or anything; when I found out what happened, the towers were already down. I was spared the trauma of seeing it happen real time, and I’m kind of thankful for that.
I was dropping off my car to be repaired in Saan Francisco (7:00AM-ish). I hadn’t watched TV or listened to the radio, The guy taking the cars in early in the morning had a very heavy accent and didn’t speak perfect aengilsh. I coldn’t understand what the hell he was talking abou-—something about bombs in New York, terrorists, and San Francisco. When my friend picked me up he told me what had happened. Dawntown SF was closed. We debated whether or to still drive down to our meeting in Cupertino. We did. In about 50 miles on 280 we saw only about twenty cars. It was like being in a science fistion movie. If the ground started to shake and a Godzilla-type monster appeared from behind a hill it would have felt exactly right. Strange, strange day.
I was at work as a glorified maintanance man in a large office building outside of Milwaukee. Someone told me that a plane had crashed into the WTC and that a bomb had gone off in DC. I unlocked a video conference room and turned on the TV just in time to see the first tower fall.
My most vivid memory of that day is seeing one of the girls from the cafeteria in the hallway and the fear and shock in her eyes and feeling such anger and thinking “I need to re-enlist”
Since this is a sort of survey, I’ll move this thread to the IMHO forum.
I was working in a lab just north of Chicago, far from any TVs or radios. My manager walked in and asked if I had heard about the plane that hit the WTC. I figured that it was some kind of Cessna or something that had been cruising by and hit the tower.
We made some jokes about the pilot not seeing the huge builiding right in front of him.
When we found out what was really going on, I felt horrible that I was making light of the situation.
We had TVs in the cafeteria where we were able to keep up to date on what was going on out east.
While working there, I lived in one of the flight paths of O’Hare. There would usually be three to four planes lined up to the west as they approached the airport. There was an erie silence those following weeks.
I just had gotten into work a little bit after 9:30 that day, and the secretary told me, “A plane’s crashed into the World Trade Center”. Somebody had a radio, so we all listened to it to try to figure out what was going on. So that’s when I heard about the second plane hitting the second tower, and then about a plane hitting the Pentagon. That’s when the secretary lost it and had to go home…her husband was in the military, and they knew people who worked at the Pentagon…some of them had kids in her kids’ daycare.
I stayed in the office until around 1, getting some work done, then went to my parents’ hotel (they were in town visiting). The Metro was closed into Virginia, so I had to take a cab, and I remember being on Route 1 crossing the Potomac and just seeing the smoke rising from the Pentagon. The cab driver also overcharged me, but that’s another story.