Where were you on 9/11?

[fencingfrog]

Hi

I was wondering where all of you people were on 9/11, and how much you knew at the time, your feelings, etc.

I was in 5th grade in NYC private school, and we knew almost nothing. Our headmistress of the school told us that the towers had been hit by a plane, and they believed that it had been hijacked. Most of the students were picked up early by parents, by the end of the day, i was one of two students left in my group.
My sisters were in 2nd grade and pre-school, and they were totally clueless.
One of my parent's friends saw it and went to our apartament because he couldnt leave the city because it was locked down. He did make it home though.
There was smoke in the air for 3 or so days, and almost everything was closed the next day, at least.

I'm just curious, I don't mean to butt in too much.

[akaiyuki]

According to some studies a lot of people have false memories on where they were on 9/11 even though they're dead sure of what they remember.

Anyway... From what I remember I walked to school that morning, and saw everyone leaving from school. So I stopped someone and asked what happened. The girl said something like, "I have no idea, I heard a bomb went off in New York or something." I was completely confused, "What does a bomb in New York have to do with everyone leaving school?" I figured out there's no school that day, went home, and as I stepped in the door, my mom goes, "Come here! Look at the news!" Yup.

[Zilverzmurfen]

Originally Posted by fencingfrog

I was wondering where all of you people were on 9/11, and how much you knew at the time, your feelings, etc.

It was a regular day at work.

And then we all heard about it on the news and we all started following the broadcasts. I remember thinking "Wow, what a mad incident!". It really was hard to grasp the extent of the incident at that point.

What affected me most was the footage of people throwing themselves out of the buildings. Terrible.

[secretly]

I was in RI, sleeping between two 18-hour shifts when one of my housemates woke me up and dragged me to the TV set. I was too exhausted to process information, so I just went back to sleep. Later I called my parents to let them know I wasn't in New York (they have a very vague idea about where I am at any given point in time), then me and a couple of friends drove to the nearest hospital to donate blood, but they didn't want it.

[jeff]

Originally Posted by fencingfrog

I was in 5th grade

5th grade? Gack, thanks for making me feel old...


In my case: there was a two-day conference starting 9/11 at Windows on the World (107th floor), and I was a scheduled speaker for the 2nd day. My plan was to show up on 9/11, get a free breakfast, attend some sessions, and reassure the organizers that I was going to show up the next day. Instead, I arrived late the night before from a business trip to Austin, and said "the heck with it - I'll sleep in". I was eating breakfast watching TV when the first plane hit and it showed up on CNN.

And that's why I'm alive to post this today.

[sabreur]

Whoa, Jeff!

I was on a bus, with almost everyone else in my office (US Army Europe Public Affairs), heading for Berlin. We were going to do a staff ride, which is basically a training event where you walk a battlefield and discuss what lessons you can apply to your current operations.... We were going to do the Battle of Berlin.

We were about six hours into an eight hour bus trip, when we started getting cell phone calls. We got the bus driver to put the German radio onto the speaker system, and heard the first garbled reports.... after about 45 minutes we pulled into a rest area, and went into the restaurant. We had them turn the TV to CNN... the first tower was already gone, and after we watched for about ten minutes later, the second tower collapsed.

We turned the bus around and drove back to Heidelberg, arriving at about 2300... Spent a week doing 12 on, 12 off shifts in the emergency operations center and watching CNN replay the footage again and again and again....

Not something I like to remember, quite frankly.... it was one of the most emotionally searing weeks of my life.

[PeterGustafsson]

Hi!


I was in a hospital, awaiting major surgery for my one-year old son. Read about it in the paper that I bought in the hospital cafeteria during the surgery. A truly unreal feeling.


Peter Gustafsson

[telkanuru]

It was my first day of my Sophmore year of high school, and we had our first classes and then the headmaster called all-school meeting at 10am. We were joking around and generally goofing off because ASMs were a bit of a joke and we didn't particularly like the headmaster. Then he walked in and told us that two planes had hit the WTC and that classes were cancelled, but we were to stay in school for the rest of the day just in case transit systems were also targeted. I don't believe anyone spoke for 10 minutes, and we all sort of somberly filed out. I spent the rest of the day trying to get in touch with my maternal uncle who was a firefighter in NYC (now a marshall in the same city). Fortunately for him, he was just getting of the ferry from Staten Island when the first tower fell.

[OROD]

I was living in Austin at the time. I guess it was a normal morning, driving to work. I turned on the radio and they were talking about how soot or ash or something like that was still coming down over the city. I had no idea what the heck they were talking about, all I could think was "what, did a volcano errupt in the middle of New York?" I dont think we had a TV set up at work, so I mainly remember listening to the radio and seeing what info there was online. I remember when someone said that one of the towers collapsed I didnt really believe it. How exactly does a building that size just fall down? But they did.

.

[OROD]

Originally Posted by Zilverzmurfen

What affected me most was the footage of people throwing themselves out of the buildings. Terrible.

Yes, me too. Every now and then they show some of this on TV. When it's on, I try not to watch too much of this stuff because I always get very angry and I want to find the people who did it and hurt them... very... badly.

[D+F+P=Hadouken!]

I was at my house, and I remember seeing it on TV.... and then seeing the towers fall.

It seemed like that day, despite whatever weather there was, was dark, both inside and out.

[T. Mock]

I was in eighth grade and had moved away from Long Island only 2 weeks prior to 9/11. We found out pretty quickly after the first plane hit and we were all watching the tv by the time the second building fell. It was really surreal. Everyone was talking about some distant connection that lived or worked in NYC but there was a huge disconnect because of the distance. I remember sitting on the carpet watching the tv and crying, surrounded by 25 kids I had just met and no one knew what to say to me. It was really hard because parents of some of my friends worked at the WTC or right near by and they all, through luck of oversleeping and missing trains didn't make it to work on time, but our local fire dept went into the city to help and unfortunately our town lost a fireman, also the father of my friend, who was a NYC firefighter and volunteered at our local dept. Mostly I remember feeling isolated from everyone because I knew that with knowing that many people working in the area there was such a small chance that everyone would be alright.

[fencingrl34]

i was in seventh or eighth grade at the time and during lunch the teachers started acting crazy, they were all running around on their cell phones and acting frantic. we got an extra 45 minutes of lunch. we were asking what was going on and the teachers were like "they bombed the twin towers, they bombed the twin towers". but after lunch the teachers tried to act as if nothing had happend, and wouldn't tell us anything. so i had to go home and watch it on tv to put the whole story together. it was nerve racking to sit in class knowing something terrible was going on, but not knowing what.

[Farfetnoogen]

I was in the 4th grade. I remember the 5th grade coming into our classroom and then the principal rolling in a TV and turning the news on. I expect that the same thing happened for the 6th, 7th, and 8th graders, but I really don't know. I was only 9 at the time, so I didn't understand why everyone was freaking out about it (it's kind of obvious now.) All the classes were basically comprised of praying since I went to a parochial school, then.

[Katman]

I was at home, asleep. I heard part of a news broadcast saying a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center when my clock radio's alarm went off. I thought to myself, "Someone ****ed up," hit the snooze button and went back to bed.

My mom called a few minutes later. She told me that we were under attack and that I should bring a T.V. to work so she could watch what was happening. Half awake and thinking she was crazy, I turned on the T.V. in my room just in time to see them replay the second plane crashing into the tower.

My drowsiness left me and I told mom that hey, you're right but no, I'm not bringing you a T.V. I then walked a block or two to my friend Callie's house and we watched the towers collapse.

When it came time, I went to my math class at the university. Only me and two other people were in the room, and it's usually a class of about 300 people. The teacher showed up anyway and conducted class.

[gtmac]

I got a news alert of the first hit on my pager while at work across the river in Jersey City. Of course everyone in the building rushed to the windows to see what had happened. We all watched as the second plane hit.

Shortly after that everyone started leaving for the train terminal in Hoboken

I watched from hoboken as the towers fell before boarding a northbound train full of people that had just scrambled to get out of the city.

Our company had just moved their IT unit from upstate NY and their buisness unit from 7 World Trade to form a single office in Jersey City about 5 months before. A lot of us from the upstate office weren't happy about the move, but we certainly weren't complaining after that day.

[KD5MDK]

I was in my dorm room in Austin. I woke up and checked my email, and saw an email to one of my mailing lists from a member in Italy that a plane had hit the world trade center. I thought it was just a little one like the one that had hit the Empire State Building in the 1940s, and went to check some news websites. When I couldn't get through to any of them, I realized it was bigger than I'd thought. I found out what was going on from one of my web forums, and then IM'd a friend downstairs who turned out to have a TV and we watched that until my 9:30 class. I then went to class, then my next one, took a German test, and had a reasonably normal day.

[Sword Hobbit]

Being home schooled I was at home awaiting the start of 5th grad math my Dad called home and told us to tern on the TV I didn't get what was going on at first, but when I figured it out I started to get scared that there would a war and my older brothers and Dad would be drafted. Latter we all went to Mass .

[suterces]

Yes all of you who were only in elementary school during 9/11 makes me feel old!
While I was old enough to understand the seriousness, it did take maybe half an hour of watching the news for it to sink in, and then, "wait...... oh my god....."

[JackOfHearts]

I was sleeping in. The previous day, I had tried to register for my Junior year of highschool with the local campus, but it seems they were full up, so I was in the process of transfering to a school several miles away. I remember waking up to the buzzer of my alarm clock, slapping it off, and then having my sister run into the room shaking me awake saying, "We're under attack! They've bombed New York!". My first thought was what? And when I heard her mention the World Trade Center I thought Is this the anniversery of that garage bombing? I soon got up, put some pants on, and walked into the living room to see the image of the smoking tower on the screen. I went to grab a glass of water from the kitchen to help me wake up. I was thinking, barely hearing what they were saying on the TV since I was still half asleep... A plane hit a building? Terrorists? Big deal. By next week, nobody will care about a dinky little cessna slamming into a building... wait, did he just say an Airliner?! Oh, **** I was pretty much in disbelief watching the rest of the coverage. Especially when that second plane hit. It just didn't seem real. It would all seem distant to me up until the following week when I finally got to my new school. Up to that point, terrorist attacks all seemed very far away. Crazies bombing each other to death over some stupid rhetoric without any sense or logic in places that may as well be part of a fairy tale. Sure, it's happened here before, like in Oklahoma City, but he was a local crazy acting on his own. This was different. This was an attack of the magnitude of Pearl Harbor. I could see it in the faces of my new school mates. It wasn't a very pleasant atmosphere to start my Junior year in. Though it's not exactly something I'll forget either.