9/11/2001 - Where were you when Bush knocked down the towers?

I was on my way to work at Xerox. I was a temp for them doing data entry at Microsoft, entering in resumes into their database. The guy I sat next to and i talked and worried all day that WWIII was going to break out because of it.

I was half asleep and I heard my dad say "We're under attack!". Being half asleep, I didn't know what the hell he was talking about. When I finally woke up, we sat around watching the news broadcasts and I remember feeling really angry and upset about what was happening. My boss called a little bit later and said they were closing down the building on account of the attacks, so I didn't have to go to work that day and spent pretty much the entire day watching the TV with my family.

I was actually in the Navy in London and at work that day. It was in the afternoon when it happened. We had a call to turn the TV on when it was only the 1 plane at that point. As soon as the 2nd hit, we all knew serious shit was going down. The entire building I worked in near the Embassy downtown was put on lockdown. I don't think anyone was allowed to enter or leave until 8pm+ in the evening.

I remember riding the tube (subway) the next day to work and it was just eerily silent while everyone was reading the newspapers following the coverage.

The Brits were pretty sympathetic and opened a makeshift memorial in Grovesnor's Square in front of the Embassy.



They later built a permanent memorial in that park.

I was in the Navy doing facilities work after finishing up A school down in Pensacola, waiting to head to my first duty station. It was a busy day.

I woke up looked at the burning building on TV, didnt realize what was going on and swapped over and played madden 2001 for the rest of the day.

9th of november? Ba-dum-tssssh.


Anyway, was at work, office. Hot as hell, no customers. Was like watching a movie. Unreal.

I was coming off of a graveyard shift of stress testing my boat's new sonar system. The first couple of people of relieving shift came into the sonar shack and said that a plane hit one of the WTC Towers. My first thought was that another little cessna hit the tower by some dumbass pilot that wasnt paying attention.

Couple more guys from the on-coming shift came in and said another plane hit the towers and it wasn't a cessna, and they told me it wasn't a small plane they were both were jets. Shortly after turnover, the whole tactical weapons department met down in the torpedo room and our weaps briefed us on what happened, and what to expect in picking up new armed sentry watches for the foreseeable future.

Siddar said:

At home wondering why all the news channels were showing the same disaster movie instead of the news. It took me a good thirty minutes to register that it was real.

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^^ This describes that morning for me perfectly. Think I saw the second tower get hit live and was like 'oh I think this really just happened'.

I was working on a fire restoration job the next town over. We were traveling the 30 minute drive when things started to happen. About noon we ran down to the store to get some lunch and that is when our whole crew found out. We knocked off a few hours early and nothing really got done Friday as we brought some radios and spent more time listening to that than working. House had no power from the fire damage obviously. I was 27 at the time.

My 9/10 was crazy.

My roommate (the one who I used to play EQ and MoH:AA with which is when I got the name AngryGerbil), was still a virgin and had met some gal from the Southern state of Kentucky in EQ and she had come into town a few days prior in order to hang out and basically pop his cherry. It was the first time I had ever met someone from 'the internet'.

She hung out with us all weekend and my friend lost his virginity. Good for him.

Anyway, she was scheduled to drive home Sunday but decided she wanted to stay another day so she called her family back home and lied and said her car was broken down. Her older brother, who was already angry that she came up here in the first place, was now in a heightened state of protectiveness. He and her mother were constantly calling her and trying to help her fix her car but she kept blowing them off because she just wanted to hang out and go home the next day. I'm not sure exactly what transpired with her and her family on the phone, but they ended up getting mad at each other. They wanted her home now, she wanted to stay and play.

So on Monday the 10th, her mother called our local police from her home in Kentucky to report a kidnapping.

The cops showed up at our apartment asking for her. She came out and explained everything and they were content and left. But before they left, they ran me and my roommate's names and found that he had failed to appear in court for a stop sign ticket some months prior. They arrest him.

This was at the time in life where we were young and worked in fast food and had barely any money at all so I couldn't pay his bail. So here I am stuck with Kentucky-girl (she was not hot) while my roommate is being processed in county lock-up. We drove down to the jail and waited for hours for them to release him on his own recognizance but they never did. After many many hours we finally went back to the apartment where.... our power was out. We forgot to pay the bill and they pulled the plug on us while we were at the jailhouse.

At some point along the way, the brother had gotten in his car and was on his way to Missouri to get his sister. So we sat up late into the night talking in the pitch black dark until her brother buzzed the main door to the apartment complex and she went out to him to go home. This was at like 2 or 3 in the morning. With no power, I had no connection to news. I fell asleep on the couch.

My roommate woke me up at about 11 the next morning. They had finally let him out and he took a cab home. He burst into the apartment and was frantic, "Dude... the twin towers are gone. They're gone." And I was like, "What do you mean, 'gone'"? He explained how he watched the whole thing live on CNN from the jail house. There was no sound on the TV in the jail so all he had was images to relate to and no sound or report or real story.

I had to know what was going on so I drove to my work (Pizza Hut) where I could hang out and watch TV and get caught up with events. That Pizza Hut had a lunch buffet every day and it normally had a line out the door every single day. But on the 11th we only had one customer for lunch: an old lady who stood there with us watching the news coverage and pounding beer. Like, she must have had 6 of them in just a couple hours and she was at least 60. No kidding. She didn't talk either, just stood there and listened as all of us went wild with speculation and conversation. There were no customers so we didn't really work, just watched the TV.

We then proceeded to have one of the busiest delivery nights in the history of that store.

Heading to class in 10th grade. Pretty much watched the news all day, in every class, which is completely surreal in highschool. In college there's always days where professors cancel class, or where time is spent just chatting about whatever, but my highschool was one of those expensive, private, ivy-oriented schools where nothing but rigid adherence to curriculum fell within the bounds of permissible instruction.

So the fact that we did literally nothing but watch news all day communicated the enormity of the event more effectively than the act of terror itself. My teachers were all in tears but I was just too young to appreciate the magnitude of the crime.

San Diego. Woke up, turned on the TV and the image of the first tower just smoking like that will never leave my head.

Was doing contract work at the time so just stayed at home and watched it all play out. Some friends came over but we didn't say much, didn't understand what was going on.

Saw the second tower get hit. And occasionally switched over to the Spanish stations. They showed all the people jumping, there were a lot of them.

Was a pretty fucked day. Felt a lot like the day of the Challenger accident.

I was in a job interview...Was crushing it, had just finished an hour with the CIO and we were on the way to sit with the Ops Manager. The three of us sat in stunned silence watching it unfold in the Ops Center. They offered the job as I left...I turned it down and it was a good thing...They were out of business 6 months later.