Where were you on 9/11?

[Go? Fencing?]

Originally Posted by oso97

Later that evening when I went home, I stood outside and listened to the silence. No planes were landing.

I remember that silence. Scary.

[jeff]

A little personal addition to my previous post.

I fortunately didn't go to the conference at the Windows on the World that morning, obviously. When it started, I grabbed a portable TV and went to my office in Hackensack, where we could see the whole thing happen from the south-facing windows, while we followed the news on all channels. We also had offices in the Towers, on 25th and 26th floors. Fortunately everybody got out: one of the admins ran around saying "get out of here!" even though the PA announcement was "stay put". On an odd note - one of the system administrators took a few extra minutes to do a clean Unix shutdown of all the servers, never figuring that they and the building they were in would be gone. We lost one person who was on one of the planes. We had a ceremony to remember him yesterday.

The next several days, bunches of us collected, dazed, at the surviving offices in the area. Some of the guys had seen terrible things - one of them, an ex-Marine who served in 'Nam said it was the worst thing he'd ever seen.

At home, we would get calls from people asking if I was okay, including people who saw my name on the speaker list for the conference. If my wife picked up the phone there would be an awkward silence, which she would break by saying "Jeff's fine - he didn't go that morning". Oddly, I hadn't read the conference announcement carefully, and somehow took it into my head that it was held in one of the floor-level meeting rooms. I guess I kind of had it in my head "well, I would have run like hell, and would have lived", because it staggered me when I re-read the invitation and saw that I would have been up on top. My wife said I was a little, er, subdued for a few days after that. The feeling was like hearing the Angel of Death's sickle pass right over your head. Basically though I never had anything to complain about or even claim "I'm a survivor"- I wasn't on-site, didn't die or get hurt, never saw anything traumatic, didn't lose anyone personally dear to me. Just another bystander and witness.

[umbrella]

It was like an instant replay.....In 6th grade we had a black-out in the eastern seaboard because all the lights went out and they made a funny movie called "Where Were You When the Lights Went Out" [whew]

But this time, it's 40 years later and I was sleeping.

[SabreBlair]

I was sitting in my homeroom, which happened to be my English class, taking the fake ISTEPs (gotta love IN standardized testing) in 9th grade. We were on the math portion, not my best to begin with, and they didn't wait until we were finished to tell us, just turned on the tv between sections, so my score, and most other students' scores were well below what they should have been. I remember sitting there being completely shocked, then going to the auditorium during lunch to be with my friends and almost-boyfriend, because that was where the school set up the quiet area for people to sit and think and pray and such. It was really surreal, I kind of didn't believe it at first.

[counter riposte]

I was living on the West Coast at the time and driving in to work when I heard the announcement that the WTC Buildings were gone. I had never gone to NYC, so there was a disconnect as to what had just happened. When I got to work, everyone was talking about it, and how security could have been improved.

We were dismissed from work and sent home, where I watched continuous footage of one plane flying into the WTC, followed by another.

[MikeHarm]

One of the interesting things for me that day was that by some cruel twist of fate they had decided that we were to celebrate all the different cultures our country did buisness with at work that day and asked us to dress up like our assigned country and I had been assigned the United Arab Emeriates. By the time I heard about the attacks it was too late to change outfits so I came in to work wearing a complete outfit like someone from Saudia Arabia or such might wear on 9/11, the robe the head wrap etc. Needless to say it didn't go over that well with my coworkers.