Well…I remember this well. Sitting in study hall when the first plane hit I knew something was amiss because teachers were whispering things around. So I go to my next period, my teacher, who was my study hall teacher turns on the tv and before we know whats going on we see the second plane hit. It was a quiet period. Then the first tower collapsed during my period after that. We weren’t able to watch tv any more then, since the teachers didn’t want to see anything else.
I was at work, getting psyched up for another exciting day of cold-calling. All of a sudden, the girl who sat catty-corner to my cube says “Holy shit!”
“What’s up, Serena?” I asked.
“An airplane just crashed into the World Trade Center!”
I figured it was some dumbass private pilot who got too close to the buildings with their wind currents. A little while later…
"Holy SHIT! "
“What’s up, Serena?”
“Another plane hit the World Trade Center - it’s on fire!”
About this time she turned up her radio so we could all hear the news reports. I e-mailed my wife and called my mother. My wife e-mailed back asking if I was kidding. By that time the Pentagon had been hit. I e-mailed what I knew to her, and told her that nobody could get on any news websites, they were all overwhelmed.
A bunch of us wandered down to the lobby to watch the news on the TV’s they had there. We started feeling very much as if we were sitting on a big target - our building was one of the largest internet hubs in the US, and we were right next to DFW’s World Trade Center building. It didn’t help that the newscasters mumbled when they stated that a plane had been hijacked from Dulles - they sounded like they were saying “Dallas” and it worried a lot of us. Our managers started finding us in the lobby and in the office and telling us to go home - we were having an unofficial evacuation. I called my wife on my cellphone on the way home and let her know - she was stuck at work the whole day. I watched the airliners queue up to land at DFW and Love Field with some apprehension as I drove home - the newscasters were still confusing “Dallas” with “Dulles” and effectively spreading panic throughout the DFW area.
I spent the day staring in disbelief at the TV and waiting for my wife to come home. I don’t really remember much about that evening.
I was dropping off my toddler son at my mother’s house for the morning when she told me the news. I listened to the whole thing on the radio on the way to work, completely numb.
I got up and went to my French class that morning; 8:00 central, 9 eastern. Nobody in a college dorm watches TV that early in the morning, we all just rolled out of bed and went to class. Nobody in class knew or suspected a thing. I came back and had a half an hour before my next class started, so I checked the SDMB. Saw the thread about the plane hitting the WTC. Turned on my roommate’s tv in disbelief, and stared at it in shock as I watched the coverage unfold. I definitely remember seeing the second plane hit the towers, and seeing them collapse live, but the times don’t seem to match up - it was then 10:00 in NYC - did I just see replays of the footage and think I was seeing them live? It doesn’t matter, really, because the shock was the same for me, but it’s something I only just now realized doesn’t seem to match up.
I called my mom back in upstate New York immediately to ask where my father was - he’s a trucker, and the company he worked for six months ago occasionally sent him down to Long Island. She didn’t know where he was but she assured me that his route never took him near the towers, so he, at least, was safe.
I went to my 9:30 class; in the plaza in front of the building I met a couple of people I knew casually, all of whom remembered that I’m from New York (and down here, all of New York must be the City, right?) so I got an unbidden group hug before class started. Then I went up to class, where the professor, pale as a ghost, said that we could all go back to our dorms or we could stay with him and watch TV in the classroom. I went back to my room, where I could stay on the phone with friends and relatives, and check for updates on the internet.
It turned out my father had been sent to Pennsylvania that day. He was very close to where the fourth plane went down.
A friend of mine who lives up on a mountain on the Hudson River insists that she could see the cloud of smoke on the horizon when she looked out her southerly window that afternoon.
Another friend called me in hysterics because her entire family lives in New York and New Jersey and she hadn’t been able to reach them all day. She eventually learned that they were alright, but of course the phone service wasn’t usable.
I’ve never been as scared in my life as I was following 9/11. I think I understand a little about the '50s now, and the cold war, and “Duck and Cover” and all of that.
So that’s where I was. In my dorm room, being scared.
At work, working on a project, when about fifteen minutes before the first tower collapsed, someone said non-chalantly, I heard that two jets crashed into the WTC.
My friggin’ company knew everything and never told us. People literally had to stop working and find others with radios.
I stormed into HR, took their portable TV and set it up in the lunch room while a coworker found a hanger and some wire to make an antennae. HR couldn’t believe that I was “assuming” this was terrorism.
I told HR that they should make an announcement.
I have not forgiven any of the losers who decided not to say anything. There are 400 people here, and three out rank me…and it was those three who kept their traps shut.
When the towers collapsed, I had just started to absorb what I heard. It happened fast on Sept 11, but when you find out an hour after everyone else, it is just that much worse.
Then, the damn fools who kept quiet paraded around like the world’s biggest patriots.
I can’t see myself forgiving them. They would have let us work all day. And here in the Philly /Jersey area, phones were out. Thank god someone was wearing a walkman and someone had a small radio.
Thier names are Mary, Judy and Diane and they can all rot in hell.
I was one block away from the World Trade Center in New York.
Zev Steinhardt
I was in Dover DE delivering a training class for my company. My class broke for a coffee break and someone ran in and told me one of the buildings just collapsed. I didn’t believe him till i went to the CNN web site.
once we found out, we got word that DE was in a state of emergency and we all had to go home, so I was in my hotel room, eating pizza, watching CNN and in chat.
Later, while the airports were closed a co-worker and I drove from Delaware to Seattle in just under 3 days to get home.
I live in California, so this happened around 6am Pacific time. Mr. Shawa is from NYC, so a friend of his called about 6am to tell him about the first plane. We tried to call his family-his mom and brother work in Manhattan but not near the WTC and his dad works in the Bronx-but we coudn’t reach anyone. Hubby went off to work, but I didn’t have to work till afternoon, so I continued to try to reach his family, and managd to leave messages on their voice mail. Even though they don’t work near WTC, we still wanted to make sure they were OK and didn’t decide to take a day off and go around the WTC for some reason. I watched CNN in a state of shock until I had to leave. I still get chills thinking about it 
Anyway, hubby’s family turned out to be OK. I went to work, and told a co-worker who had not turned on the TV or radio at all about the whole thing. Since she first heard about the disaster from me, she says she’ll never forget me. The whole thing was so surreal and sometimes I still have a hard time believing it happened
I was at work.
I worked in a bus building factory, so there wasn’t any TV to watch or radio to listen to. The team leaders on the floor logged on to internet out on the floor and followed the happenings on line.
My first thoughts were for Cajun Man and Dr Matrix, because they were planning on coming to Minnesota for a visit, so Spider Woman and I had been in conact with them a lot at that time.
Word spread about the attacks, but no one really new what was going on.
6-7 hours later on the way home I listened on the radio, and couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
I got home and started watching the reports, and started crying.
Hell, I’m crying right now.
10:00 in Ms. Healey’s French class. I was talking to my friends Bart and Stanley when Principal Hudson, an odd timbre to his voice, came over the loudspeaker and announced what had happened. It explained the fact that the librarian came into the language lab (a room with 30 computers where you can also record stuff on cassettes in personal booths) After that I dashed down to the newspaper office to get all the details, and soon after my friend Greg and I watched the events unfold in the graphics room with the graphics teacher and an art teacher. We watched CNN the rest of the day.
I was between two classes (it was just after the first plane hit) and somehow some students heard something had happened, but they didn’t know what it was. Strangely that was the one day I decided to bring my handheld tv, just a 2.5 inch screen to school. I hadn’t brought the thing out of the house in over a year, but that day I don’t know why, but I threw it in my backpack. I went to my locker, turned on the tv, and saw the second plane hit. I watched the tv through all study hall, 72 min, with the volume down. Every time there was an update on the bottom of the screen I’d write it in big letters and hold it up for the rest of the room to see. That’s just about when I got scared, just seeing what was going on was too much, I just got scared.
And I just found those papers in my locker a couple weeks ago, I found it scary.
Between classes on my ten minute break, I walked into the library, which adjoins my class. My sorta-friend Brian noticed me and said “Hey, a plane hit the World Trade Center.” “What?” I said. “Sure.” “I’m serious, a couple planes have hit the world trade center towers.” I wasn’t sure what to think, so I just went on. The time was about 9:50. I dropped my backpack and made a “lap” around the halls, not sure if I should believe what I had just been told. Once I was back in the hall leading toward the library, I spotted Brian again, walking in the opposite direction. “Another plane hit the Pentagon” he said “And the North Tower of the WTC has collapsed.” I felt a chill run through me. He was serious.
I sprinted into the library and sat down at a computer. I immediately pointed the browser at Boston.com, and oh dear sweet Jesus… I stumbled into class, shocked. Not long afterwords, (about half an hour) the faculty called us all together, to let everyone know what was happening. It was here that I learned, to my horror, that the SOUTH tower had collapsed as well. The World Trade Center was gone. Just gone.
We were sent back to advisories (homerooms) and spent the whole day either listening to the radio or writing, or talking. People trickled home throughout the day, and I was unfortunately one of the last to leave. It was a bad, bad day.
I hate to nitpick your bad experience, but the South tower collapsed first.
Zev Steinhardt
I was also at work. I came into the office at about 10:30 our time (which is 9:30 NY time) from a meeting at a store and the receptioniste asked if I had heard it on the radio. We logged onto the net to see what was going on. I was sure it was some sort of joke email ( out computer guy is quite the joker)
Unfortunately it was not. I called my mom to see if she had heard, and she did. Then not a half hour later we heard the planes were landing here in our little city, so we headed up to the colliseum, where the passengers were going to be brought.
I can be proud that we were the first company there, and before the first load of disoriented passenger arrived we were set up with coffee and donuts for them…and we settled in for the long haul.
I already posted about this on another MB I visit so I’ll just copy what I put here. Well with a couple of changes so it’s neater but essentially the same.
*When it happened… I was in bed. I only found out about it around 8 am MST when I came to school (I don’t have a portable radio so I listen to my discman while on the bus). I was up in the library killing time before class… and saw Dave’s post about it on another MB. (Another Dave on another MB) I spent the rest of my time scanning news sites and other places I visit about it (especially the SDMB, which is now blocked from school -rolls her eyes-) I then went to class and we had a semi-normal class. We always discuss what is going on in the news and people were asking questions so most of that class we sat and discussed what we knew and what was happening. During our 10 min break I came back online to check for updates… I was apparently the most informed person in my class because of this.
Later that day I went and lit candles at St Joe’s. I’m not really Catholic anymore or anything… but it seemed appropriate. I watched the news that night but I hardly watched it after. It was too much… and I was numb from shock that someone could do something like that.
It was too strange having to go to school and work when something like that was happening. It felt surreal. *
I was at work at the Nashville International Airport, in the State Photo Lab.
The boys in Computer Photogrammetry heard about it online, first.
We broke out a pocket TV when the Internet shut down from too much load.
My bosses’ boss kept saying:“Don’t none of this mean anything. Don’t none of this effect us nohow.” :rolleyes: :mad:
The next day the Airport was closed, our airborne photoshoots cancelled indefinitely. He shut up fast, after that.
Odd note–the band Aerosmith was trapped in Nashville for a time, & their jet stayed here the whole time flights were banned. Custom paint job & all.
I was standing ontop of the scaffolding during band class conducting, when our director walked up to the field and told us everything that had happened. By that time, the first tower had been struck, and the second was hit when we were heading down to the school. We sat in the library for the rest of the period huddled together watching CNN.
I was sleeping in, my first day off in a while (turns out I would’ve had it off anyways, since Starbucks closed all their retail stores that day), and was woken up by my roommate charging upstairs to close the window because the painters were waterblasting the apartment complex.
“Um, do you want to go back to sleep,” she said, “or do you want to know what’s happening in the world right now?”
“Why? What happened?”
“Someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center. Two, actually. Another one hit the Pentagon.”
Still sleepy, totally unable to grasp the enormity of the situation, my brilliant comment was, “Why can’t they just leave the World Trade Center alone?”
“Well, they’re going to now,” said my roommate, “it’s not there anymore. It collapsed, both towers.”
This is one of those situations we’ll be telling our children and grandchildren. Like my mother telling me where she was when she heard that Kennedy had been shot.
I was at work. We got bad radio reception, so we had CDs on most of the time in our office. My wife called me to tell me about the first plane, and a couple of us went and jury rigged the TV used for training videos to pick up the one channel it could get, all of us still thinking that it was a horrible accident. Just as we got a clear picture, the second plane hit.
I was a bit more than freaked out, having been 4 miles from the OKC bombing and trying to put that building in perspective with the WTC. The boss, however (single-owner company), was conducting a job interview, and wouldn’t be interrupted for anything. When he was told, he told the sales manager to get his people back on the phones. We in production were told to get back to our layout. It took another hour of no sales whatsoever for him to let us go.
Meanwhile, I’m staring at a blank Word screen trying to write a relocation guide on Montgomery County, MD and block out the images from the time I spent at the OKC site. When he let us go, I went home and got stinking drunk while reading the internet news, the SDMB, and having AM news radio on, and ABC on one TV and CNN on the other.
I had stopped having nightmares about OKC, but they came back after the WTC.
In other news, the SOB let me go at the end of September in favor of his original first choice for the job who moved back to town. I’m still looking.
It was my second day at work at a place I will call “Scumbags Inc.”
because I cannot divulge it’s real name. Every morning we had a meeting at 8:30, and that day was no different. Our boss said a few words about the tragedy, then gave us a motivational speech
about not being emotional at work. Needless to say, we were all crying and hugging each other. Not to mention the fact that I was
trying to learn new job skills. We were told that there was no excuse to be less than normally productive that day. Half of us went home at lunch and never came back. What a crappy place to work. Basically it was a glorified telemarketing place, and it just felt dirty to even be calling anyone and disturbing them that day. God, am I glad to be out of the business world and back to nursing. I may never make $200,000 a year, but at least I can share emotions with other human beings again.