Where were you on 9-11?

[Thegonagle]

I was asleep in my bed. Having fallen asleep watching Conan O'Brien the night before, the TV was still on when it woke me up. I was about to turn it off and go back to sleep for few more hours, until I heard the commentator talking of "this tragedy," and "major disaster."

My eyes focused in on a live image of the two towers in NYC on fire. For a moment, I thought "this must be a horror movie review," so I switched to another channel, saw the same image, and the caption "Airplanes crash into World Trade Center." I realized at that second that terrorists had attacked the WTC towers for the second time in my lifetime. I watched as both towers fell to the ground on live TV.

There are now three major "where were you when?" events in my life that I'm sure I will never forget: The Challenger explosion in 1986, the attacks of 9/11/2001, and locally, the collapse of Interstate 35W into the Mississippi River on August 1.

 

[nonameo]

I was in class.

 

[meltdown75]

I was at work, and then left the office to go do some field work. I got called back into work because they had to close our office - it sits on an international crossing (Windsor / Detroit tunnel).

The rest of the day I just watched TV and listened to radio reports. Just a surreal day... still hard to stomach

 

[AVAFREAK182]

brushing my teeth

 

[Kreon]

The Cafeteria in Junior High
I remember the assistant principal coming in, and quieting us down, and telling us something bad had happened
Then she told us what. Most of the people in the cafeteria had no clue what the WTC was, but I did
My uncle worked there, and had been laid off a couple months prior.
But he was in DC, a few miles from the Pentagon, and I had a panic attack
I spent the rest of the day waiting for news of my uncle in the guidance office

I'm pissed cause my school had a 3 second moment of silence today-nothing else
It's like nobody cares anymore

 

[3NF]

Unfortunately, at work - watching the buildings burn. I left the 12th floor to go back to my office on the 2nd floor. It was during that time that the 1st tower fell.

 

[eakers]

walked out of my first class and was going home to have a nap when I noticed huge crowds of people around the televisions in the University Center. Saw the first tower on fire and some girl told me someone had crashed a small plane into the WTC then the second plane hit. Sat in the UC until my afternoon class (which carried on as usual with no mention of what happened).

 

[TheVrolok]

11th grade - Mr. Farnsworth's statistics class.

 

[Mallow]

Woke up to my sister calling me at like 8AM telling me to turn on the news. Put it on CNN and was in awe... about 10 mins later the second plane hit.

 

[SinfulWeeper]

I was waiting to catch my flight to Anchorage so I can see my daughter born when I was (well everyone at the airport) was informed that all flights in the US are canceled. I missed the second biggest thing in my life to witness because of a few people not even remotely close to me.

 

[thebigdude]

It was my freshman year and I didn't have class until noon that day so I was sleeping in. My roommate came back after one of his classes got cancelled and woke me up. It was about two minutes before the second plane hit. We spent the rest of the day around the dorms hanging out with different people and watching it on tv. It is only the second event of my life that I can remember where I was and what I was doing when it happened. The other was the Oklahoma City Bombing.

 

[josh0099]

I was taking the state exam that I had to pass to graduate High School....They kept the information from us, though some found some shaky details during one of our breaks. Wasn't until after the first building fell before I actually knew what happened.

 

[buzzsaw13]

I was in high school in bio class. Watched the second plane hit on the news during class and eventually we all got sent home.

 

[Journer]

sleeping in biology class ^_^ ahh the good ole days

 

[IEC]

German class. Some guy came back from delivering stuff to the office and said "Some towers in New York just got bombed or sh!t"

Our teacher turned on the TV and we just gawked at it for an hour.

 

[spherrod]

Originally posted by: ultimatebob
I was at work. The Internet access was down, and I ended up getting the news from my pager. I told my co-workers, and at first they didn't believe me!

similar here - internet slowed to a crawl. Someone turned a TV on and that was it

 

[potato28]

Sleeping, my dad woke me up and said that they fell. The next day it took him 4 hours to get through security at his work(he works at a power plant).

 

[fierydemise]

I was in 6th grade and I live on the West Coast so normally I wouldn't have been awake at the time but my teacher had assigned us a short essay to assess our writing skills and I was up early finishing it, our topic was how the government affects my life. I was writing about how the government makes me safe, when I heard on the radio that the first WTC had been hit. There was so much confusion (I first heard it was a small prop plane) that I didn't realize the irony of what I was writing till much later.

 

[Eeezee]

Asleep in my room

For 50% of America it was either 5:30 or 6:30 in the morning when it started happening. It's not like the JFK assassination (middle of the day)

 

[bamacre]

Requested bump

Personally, I woke up to get ready for work. As I was getting dressed, I oddly decided to listen to the radio. They were talking about a "small plane" that flew into the WTC. When I got into my car headed for work, listening to the same radio station, news started to come in that it was not a small plane, but an airliner.

When I parked my car and starting walking toward the 36-story building I work in, tons of people were waiting by the elevator. Apparently there had been a false fire alarm earlier. Rumors were flying, everyone was talking about it as they waited for the elevator. I remember someone saying they heard that a car bomb went off in front of the state department building.

At this time in my life, I worked in market research, and during the day, we did surveys with businesses for FedEx and IBC (Blue Cross). I spent most of the early morning removing all NY, PA, and NJ phone numbers from our calling lists. Afterwards, I watched all the news on a TV we had in our Focus Group room, and every once in a while walked through our phone room informing our interviewers what was going on, and also calming them down a bit (our office was located on the 31st floor).

It was odd not seeing any airplanes going by, as I live in Memphis, and you could normally set a watch by FedEx's planes flying past our windows. Every 60 seconds.

 

[Anubis]

art history class, not caring about art history, they came in mumbled some junk put it on the projecter, some people left, person to the left of me was more worried about where the WTO meating was gonna be moved to

i then went to my next class which i think was electronics

 

[Nitemare]

Was at work and neffing on here.

 

[racolvin]

On my way to work, listening to NPR when the first one had hit. Got to work and spent most of the day watching the news coverage in our huge conference room with a wall-sized projection of the live news casts. And by wall, I mean 20ft x 25ft - we had piles of people up there watching when the first tower started to fall and I don't think there was a soul breathing in the entire room at that point. It was incredibly surreal the entire day ....

 

[OdiN]

Well I woke up and just went on my way to work. I flipped on the radio on the way and for a while was trying to figure out what was going on as the morning show people were talking about something and they weren't playing music. Took a bit before they started kinda rehashing what was going on. We didn't really do much at work that day besides watch TV, etc.

 

[queenrobot]

Sleeping in my bedroom. I was sick and it was my birthday. I got a call from my Dad letting me know what had gone down. Crazy day.