Happy Atheist Forum

I was in South Africa, at Dimension Data's offices in the Tigerburg hills just outside Cape Town. I was in a meeting and somebody came in and said a plane had crashed into the WTC. We all vacated into the restaurant where CNN was on the TV. One of the American ladies had a brother who worked near the WTC. We watched and then saw the second plane hit the second tower. The rest is history.

Where were you on that fateful day?

I had strep throat and a friend of mine was coming over to take me to the doctor.  I remember he told me about planes crashing into buildings and I thought he was either messing with me or I was possibly delirious from fever.

... working at Verizon corporate hq in Dallas.

Everything stopped.  I think we were all in shock.  We all gathered in the conference rooms to watch the news.
Calls went out to our offices in NYC, and managers checked on anyone who was scheduled to fly.  Those NYC guys were amazing - they worked around the clock in terrible conditions to get communications back up and running.

I was at college trying to sleep in the student lounge between class while watching it on the TV. That semester I had class all day on Tuesdays with a few one or two hour break in between some of them. 7am till 11pm on Tue, Wed and Thu, in order to get a four day weekend.

I was at my office working that morning.  My husband at the time called me to tell me what happened and I didn't believe him until I started checking the news online.

I was on my way to take a physics exam and caught the news just as we were turning off the tv to go to class...the bitch of a professor still made us take the exam; even people who had family in the area and were worried.

I was a Sophomore in high school, in my second period Spanish class.  A kid came in late and said he'd been in the office and a plane had crashed into the WTC.  We didn't have a TV, so we listened to the news on the radio.

It was my junior year of college. We had just returned from playing New Mexico the Sunday before (9-9-01). The game was on Saturday but it was a late game and the airplane got a flat at the El Paso airport so we didn't take off until almost 1am. I was jacked up on muscle relaxers and couldn't sleep so I moseyed around the plane. I made my way up to the front and was asking the flight attendant some questions, just making small talk. I asked what protocol was for a hijacking and she replied company policy was to do exactly as they were told. A little later she asked if I wanted to sit in the cockpit for a while. The pilots were cool with it so I went in. Holy crap there are a lot of buttons and levers In a 757.

Anyway, it was during a time in the football season where football had started but school had not, so our scholarships paid for 3 meals a day, therefore training table provided us breakfast. I would usually walk in to most of the players having the tvs tuned to BET music videos or MTV music videos so usually I ate quick and left, because I really don't like rap all that much. What I dislike more are rap fans in large groups. (I actually witnessed a fistfight between LaDarus Jaxkson and TJ Houshmandzadeh about who has better rappers; LA or Houston)

that Tuesday morning, the tvs were on CNN. Out of the corner of my eye I saw the banner which read "America Under Attack". I remeber vividly thinking "typical liberal hyperbole". It wasn't until I sat down with my cafeteria waffles and saw a hole in the Pentagon that I realized this was the real deal.

But... It really wasn't until Coach Erickson came to our team meeting and didn't say a word about football did I realize that this was the real real deal. Turns out Coach had a nephew in the south tower but he was on vacation that day.

I will never forget that, even after 33 concussions from the aforementioned football.

Hismikeness

I was still asleep when it actually happened. Being on the West Coast, the planes struck the towers at 5:46 a.m. and 6:03 a.m., while the third plane hit the Pentagon at 6:37 a.m., maybe 10 minutes before I used to wake up to get to class on time. I saw it on TV, iirc, but decided to head in to class anyway. School was a mess. Some people were crying, some people were angry, but most people were just quiet.

This may sound callous, but I didn't really think it was that big a deal.

I was living in Vancouver in 2001. My husband was on an early start and he called me from work and told me to put the TV on - I did just as the second plane hit the towers. I called my family in the UK... before that, it seems strange to say that my only concern was getting to the music store on time, because the Bob Dylan album 'Love and Theft' was released on 9/11/2001 and we had been waiting for it in great excitement.

I watched the TV footage for as long as I could stand. I am not a person who revels in disaster and with some of the personal tragedies being played out there, it seemed like distasteful voyeurism to be watching the people who were dying before our eyes. I didn't want to see it.

As an afterword, there was a line in the second song on that Dylan album ('Mississippi') that says, '...Sky's full of fire, pain pouring down...' and I remember hearing those lyrics in the days after the attack and feeling that Bob Dylan was onto something...

I´m so young that I don´t really remember

I was probably getting ready to go to school or something.

I was in the office at work when my boss came in and told us what happened. My colleagues and I couldn't believe it until we saw the dreadful images on CNN.

I was playing with my doggie in Alabama, early in the morning in the front yard. I didn't find out until lunch.

I was at work.  I didn't even know anything happened until 2 or 3 that afternoon.

Working in my office (which is in my home).

I was in a pub in England. There was a wide-screen television there showing the twin towers and as I sat down with my pint the bartender said that a plane had flown into one of the World Trade Center buildings. At first we thought some horrible accident had taken place, and then I saw the second plane hit.

I remember that I jumped up and started shouting. To be overseas when a thing like that happened, it was maddening. I was supposed to fly out a few days later but I had to stay in England for over a week before I could leave.

The day after the attack American flags were to be seen all over London.

I was sleeping on my parent's couch (Cuero, Texas).  I was visiting them and had stayed the night.  I remember my sister coming into the living room saying "Someone just flew a plane into the World Trade Center!"  Then I remember watching the news most of the day.  My father later heard from an old friend of his who was an ER doctor at a close by hospital - he didn't sleep for nearly two days.

I was a freshman in high school and I had my TV set to turn on in the morning as my alarm. I always had it set to the news so I could watch it while I got ready in the morning. I remember just as I was waking I looked at the TV in time to see the 2nd plane hit. I didn't quite understand what had happened for the next minute or 2 I just sat there trying to understand it. Once I realized what was going on I ran into my parents room and turned their TV on to tell them what had happened.

I was in Air Force JROTC so I put my uniform on for inspection that day and went to school. Every class we watched the news.

I am an IT consultant, working with web development. The customer I was working for at the time had offices in across the road from a apartment block, in Oslo, Norway. In the apartment on the same level as our office, a group of east european strippers were living. They could se us sitting working on our computers, and they routinely teased us by passing their windows without any clothes. Anyway, when the first plane hit, one of my friends notified me on the IRC channel we were both on, and then a second later, the guy sitting next to me said the same thing. I pictured a little Cessna and a silly accident, but when the second plane hit we all got pretty nervous. If this was an attack, would Bush go completely mad and start a "new-kular" war? I called my dad, who's birthday is on this date. He was out playing golf, and had heard the news already.We spent the rest of the day trying to work while still trying to get as much information about the events as possible. A few days later, Norway (and I guess the rest of the world), stopped for a minute of silence for the victims. We went out on a balcony, facing the apartment block, and had a quiet undisturbed minute, which felt meaningful.

I was at work in the office when someone came round saying a passenger jet had hit one of the towers. None of the news websites would work so i went to the local supermarket and stood and watched the bank of TV's there for a few hours. I got there just after the second plane hit so was greeted with the image of that enormous fireball. Initially i thought someone was playing a joke and they had a movie playing.  

Saw it happen on a television in a little store/diner I stopped at to buy cigarettes on my way home from a comparative religion class. The topic that day was Islam.

 

I was only 8 years old at that time, so I don't remember where I was at that time exactly. But I remember we heard about it in school the next day. I was too young to understand how serious it was.

I was at my then boyfriend's house (now husband) we were sleeping and his buddy woke us up by pounding on the door.  They were both in the Army reserves and it was pretty intense once we saw the second plane hit and realized it wasn't an accident.  We lived in a tiny town so of course they were thinking of Patrick Swayze in Red Dawn.  It's weird because one of the things I remember the most is that we had never talked to his neighbors once in the 6-7 months that they had lived there but we stood watching his television in silence because our t.v. was broken.

At school, I think. Having like... Math.

Some hectic stories here.
Seems like Tank and I were in the same country at the time. In fact, Tank, you were quite near to where I live at the moment.
I was in Mosselbay in the Western Cape I think. High school. My parents were going through a divorce at the time so I don't think I was too assed about foreign affairs. I still remember watching when the second plane hit though. It was a vicious break from my reality of watching things like that on movies and suddenly have to reconcile such horrible images with what was actually happening at that exact moment. I think I was 14 at time.

Chicago, 103rd st, in my lab trying to de-engineer and new package from our competitor.   Was listening to 101.9 when Eric came on with the announcement that a plane had hit one of the trade towers.  Radios were turned on all over the plant immediately.
We finally found an old TV that got a station and watched as the towers collapsed.  Most of downtown Chicago was evacuated, our boss said we were staying since we were literally on the edge of the city limits next to the landfill.

Now that is so totally weird..... I posted that at least a week ago and it just now showed up  

Quote from: "KDbeads"Now that is so totally weird..... I posted that at least a week ago and it just now showed up  

That is weird, 'cause I think I read that a while (a week) ago.

I bumped the thread. The mechanism may be to make the last post 'unread' thus pushing the thread back up to the top of the 'new post' files. Good news you may not be going mad!

Oh good.... with all this veggie prepping and egg peeling I thought I was seeing things for a minute.....

My girlfriend woke me up telling me that a plane had hit one of the towers.  Being a former Air Force firefighter, I immediately thought of the 1945 accident involving a B-25 hitting the Empire State Building, and said as much.  She roused me again about three minutes later with the news that another plane had hit.  AOL was going nuts with the news.

At the time, I lived about 200 foot from the main gate of the big Naval Base Ventura County, and was able to dispel my disbelief by stepping outside my door and seeing the traffic jam that the base's lockdown had imposed.

I'm glad I didn't have to work that day; I would had to have walked.

I had missed the school day and didn't know of anything until my younger sister burst into the room after school saying that world war III had started. At first I didn't take her seriously, she was only 12 at the time and didn't know squat about world wars 1 and 2 but then saw it on CNN myself. WWIII or not, it took awhile to digest.

Quote from: "xSilverPhinx"I had missed the school day and didn't know of anything until my younger sister burst into the room after school saying that world war III had started. At first I didn't take her seriously, she was only 12 at the time and didn't know squat about world wars 1 and 2 but then saw it on CNN myself. WWIII or not, it took awhile to digest.

You know she may well have been right. One day our descendants may look back at 9/11 and see it as 'the smoking gun' that started WWIII.

Back in those days, I worked in trash, or rather the solid waste department. I was on the side of the truck when we came up to the last house on a street and there's this Gallagher looking guy that runs out to us and yells "They've flown airplanes into the World Trade Centre." I reply "What?"  And he says it again. I figured he was somewhat nuts. At the time I didn't know what the WTC was but I knew it was in New York.
So the next stop I get off the truck and tell the driver; he shrugs his shoulders. When we finally get back to the shop and in the break room, it's on TV. Then I recognise the towers. We were back on the road by the time they collapsed. Later in the day, a Christian woman I know, who's house we stopped at to pick up her trash happened to be out and I asked her if she heard the news. She says yup and every Muslim should be wiped out for it.

I was just leaving my apartment on the UWS of Manhattan when the first plane hit.  One of my roommates told me about it in passing, as I was leaving the building.  My sleep-deprived brain didn't process what he was talking about until later.  I was on my way to a rehearsal for a show I was doing in Chelsea (also in Manhattan, for those who don't know the area, it's a neighborhood on the lower west side).  

By the time I arrived, and walked into the rehearsal hall, the 2nd plane had already struck, and the buildings were beginning to collapse.  Everyone in the rehearsal studio was gathered around the television.  I'll never forget the chilling sound of wails and shrieks of the people next to me in the room, or of the sight of the buildings, knowing it was happening mere blocks away.  I called everyone I knew in the city that day, just to make sure.  Turns out one of my friends was in the 1st tower, but was able to get out in time.

Thanks to all who have contributed to this thread, it has been very enlightening to read your stories.

Quote from: "Tank"

Quote from: "xSilverPhinx"I had missed the school day and didn't know of anything until my younger sister burst into the room after school saying that world war III had started. At first I didn't take her seriously, she was only 12 at the time and didn't know squat about world wars 1 and 2 but then saw it on CNN myself. WWIII or not, it took awhile to digest.

You know she may well have been right. One day our descendants may look back at 9/11 and see it as 'the smoking gun' that started WWIII.

Yes, could be.

One thing it started was the stronger division between "west" and "east"...and only time will tell where that division will lead.

In school, I was in first grade.
I had no idea what was going on.

Quote from: "skwurll"In school, I was in first grade.
I had no idea what was going on.

He the worldwide audience what age is first grade?

Quote from: "Tank"

Quote from: "skwurll"In school, I was in first grade.
I had no idea what was going on.

He the worldwide audience what age is first grade?

Usually 6 and 7 years old.

Quote from: "pinkocommie"

Quote from: "Tank"

Quote from: "skwurll"In school, I was in first grade.
I had no idea what was going on.

He the worldwide audience what age is first grade?

Usually 6 and 7 years old.

Thanks!

Quote from: "pinkocommie"

Quote from: "Tank"

Quote from: "skwurll"In school, I was in first grade.
I had no idea what was going on.

He the worldwide audience what age is first grade?

Usually 6 and 7 years old.

Isn't it 5 and 6?

5 and 6 is usually Kindergarten.  :yay:

Quote from: "pinkocommie"5 and 6 is usually Kindergarten.  :yay:

Meaning the first year you don't actually learn something? If that's what you ment; very true.