We will never forget! Remembering 9/11

[Geekbabe]

It is hard to believe so many years have passed since that tragic day. What were you doing on that day? How did you first find out what was happening?

I had taken a nap after getting my kids off to school, stumbled to my computer & saw footage of the first plane hitting the WTC. Half awake I thought it was a trallor for a new movie I stand there, stunned,,shocked

 

[z1ggy]

In 8th grade. Announcement over the speakers we all have to go to the auditorium for some reason. Figured we were all in trouble or something. Come to find out what happened... Parents start showing up to the school freaking out, taking kids home.

I think it was more of a stressful situation by me because I was only a short drive away from NYC at the time. As a kid, I'm not totally sure I understood the gravity of the situation.

 

[ThatsABigOne]

2nd grade in Minsk, Belarus. I came home to watch cartoons at 3-4pm. Every channel on TV(~12 or so at the time) switched to showing 9/11 without any commentary. I thought it was some movie so I kept watching. I didn't realize all of it was real until first plane hit one of towers. I thought to myself, "Wow, I've never seen special effects this good. This must be real."

 

[CraKaJaX]

8th grade as well. Got out of science class and was on my way to history. I remember hearing about it in the hallway that something happened in the city (my HS was about 40 miles north of NYC, so "the city" is NYC). I got to history class and the teacher already had a TV in the room with the news on... the first building had already been hit. That's when we all watched in awe when the second plane hit on live television. Being so young I really didn't understand what the hell was going on, but the entire school seemed to have had the wind knocked out of it. The teachers seemed to have the feeling of sadness, devastation, fear, and confusion to them. It was VERY weird. Being so close to the city, we went into a lockdown at school. We did not change classes at all that day and were just glued to the TV. I will certainly never forget.

Flash forward to now - my current boss and my cube mate worked in the towers at their previous job. They both worked in the second (south) tower that was hit. Luckily they got out in time. Their stories are quite unbelievable... I've only heard bits and pieces of that day as they don't like to talk about it a lot.

 

[Brainonska511]

In 8th grade on LI (and my dad worked in the city, across the street from the WTC). Around 9AM, say start of 2nd period, there was a brief announcement about the school going into "lockdown" and throughout the day, there were seemingly more people than usual called down to the office, but nobody said anything to us. I didn't know what happened until my mom stopped by in the early afternoon and told me that my dad was okay and what had happened. But I couldn't understand it at the time, because how could two large buildings just be "gone"? I didn't really grasp what happened until I saw the news when I got home.

 

[Kaido]

I was in my first CompSci class in college. Some kid walked in late and said an airplane hit a building. We all thought it was a Cessna or something...when we got out of class, the entire school was glued to the school televisions watching the news coverage. I remember sitting in my car listening to the radio stunned, then going home & seeing it on TV. It's just one of those things you can't even comprehend when you see it.

My buddy lived down the street from the WTC & was sending me pictures online. It was crazy...the towering NYC landscape with just a huge cloud of black smoke billowing out. No one talked about anything else for days. Terrible event

 

[Kaido]

Flash forward to now - my current boss and my cube mate worked in the towers at their previous job. They both worked in the second (south) tower that was hit. Luckily they got out in time. Their stories are quite unbelievable... I've only heard bits and pieces of that day as they don't like to talk about it a lot.

Over the last 15 years or so I've run into so many people who were either supposed to be on the planes or in the building at the time. I mean I'm sure that happens all the time, but to live to tell about it simply because of a missed connection or whatever is crazy! I was actually just at a work meeting recently and three of the people there was supposed to be on the WTC planes & all missed their flights for some reason or another, and because of that coincidence they were all alive today Gives me the shivers man!

 

[ultimatebob]

My office in New York basically got evacuated because we thought that we might we (IBM HQ) might be the next terrorist target. We were all a bit paranoid that day.

I spent a good chunk of the day fixing the network (16Mb/s Token Ring, ugh!) which was overloaded with people trying to load the news sites to find out what was going on.

 

[z1ggy]

8th grade as well. Got out of science class and was on my way to history. I remember hearing about it in the hallway that something happened in the city (my HS was about 40 miles north of NYC, so "the city" is NYC). I got to history class and the teacher already had a TV in the room with the news on... the first building had already been hit. That's when we all watched in awe when the second plane hit on live television. Being so young I really didn't understand what the hell was going on, but the entire school seemed to have had the wind knocked out of it. The teachers seemed to have the feeling of sadness, devastation, fear, and confusion to them. It was VERY weird. Being so close to the city, we went into a lockdown at school. We did not change classes at all that day and were just glued to the TV. I will certainly never forget.

Flash forward to now - my current boss and my cube mate worked in the towers at their previous job. They both worked in the second (south) tower that was hit. Luckily they got out in time. Their stories are quite unbelievable... I've only heard bits and pieces of that day as they don't like to talk about it a lot.

Crazy you work with people who were first hand directly affected.

 

[z1ggy]

Over the last 15 years or so I've run into so many people who were either supposed to be on the planes or in the building at the time. I mean I'm sure that happens all the time, but to live to tell about it simply because of a missed connection or whatever is crazy! I was actually just at a work meeting recently and three of the people there was supposed to be on the WTC planes & all missed their flights for some reason or another, and because of that coincidence they were all alive today Gives me the shivers man!

Apparently Seth MacFarlane was supposed to be on one of the planes. Imagine if he was? No Family Guy, probably No American Dad... No Ted.

 

[CraKaJaX]

My buddy lived down the street from the WTC & was sending me pictures online. It was crazy...the towering NYC landscape with just a huge cloud of black smoke billowing out. No one talked about anything else for days. Terrible event

I remember this being the only thing on TV for months. No one had any idea what to think, but they were broadcasting anything and everything about it on every channel.

 

[lxskllr]

Was laying out a bridge. Went home, dragged the tv up from the basement, and watched planes crash into buildings for a week. Put the tv back in the basement, and that was the last time I had tv in the house.

 

[destrekor]

There's a trend here...

8th grade. Second period is when it happened. Math teacher had a phone call, but he must have made the decision to just keep on with the course. Let out, get to 3rd period, and it's already on the TV. Watch everything else unfold between 3rd period and 4th period (Language Arts). I can't remember if we watched the news all day or if we continued on with actual learning in the afternoon. I don't think we did any classwork, but we did keep moving on to the different classes.

Honestly, I can't remember if we were let out early that day or not. We were far enough removed from everything (in NW Ohio - yeah, quite a bit of distance) that there wasn't a lockdown or anything like that, but there may have been an early release... or not. I cannot remember whatsoever, I just remember going shopping later in the day and remarked how eerie it was with no planes in the sky except fighter jets passing over from time to time. That was a little nerve racking too... were they just on alert, or on the move to intercept anything else?

 

[CraKaJaX]

Crazy you work with people who were first hand directly affected.

Yea. A lot of the guys they knew didn't make it. Guys that were waiting for the elevator mostly. Everyone who took the stairs (for the most part), got out alive. The elevators were so backed up that it couldn't handle the traffic all at once. Unbelievable. They both live in Queens (and still do), and they mentioned that they remember trying to get back across the river to get home, turning around and seeing the second plane hit their building. That's when people started jumping. Believe it or not, they were back to work two days later at a remote location here on LI. Said remote location was actually a storage site where they had some computers, old paperwork, etc. but they literally had to start everything from square one again. What a nightmare.

 

[Geekbabe]

I am struck by how young most of you are! I had an 8th grader that year & will ask him tonight what he remembers.

 

[Kaido]

I spent a good chunk of the day fixing the network (16Mb/s Token Ring, ugh!) which was overloaded with people trying to load the news sites to find out what was going on.

Wow...I came in at the end of the BNC era; I've always been extremely grateful for Ethernet because of that. Gigabit CAT6 + IP reservations & DHCP make my job a breeze!

 

[z1ggy]

Yea. A lot of the guys they knew didn't make it. Guys that were waiting for the elevator mostly. Everyone who took the stairs (for the most part), got out alive. The elevators were so backed up that it couldn't handle the traffic all at once. Unbelievable. They both live in Queens (and still do), and they mentioned that they remember trying to get back across the river to get home, turning around and seeing the second plane hit their building. That's when people started jumping. Believe it or not, they were back to work two days later at a remote location here on LI. Said remote location was actually a storage site where they had some computers, old paperwork, etc. but they literally had to start everything from square one again. What a nightmare.

Yeah can't imagine being a survivor of that even, even if I was on floor 1 when it happened.

I think what haunts me the most is video from people inside the main lobbies, hearing/seeing the sounds of people jumping.

 

[Jaskalas]

Had recently moved, had no TV setup.

We were all still sleeping when a phone call came in from an elderly relative that New York and DC were "attacked", and of course that translated into "taken out". Passed along info becomes rather... useless... real fast.

My father hooked up the Dish and TV with a temporary cable in record time. We were able to begin watching live coverage after the second impact, before the collapse of the towers.

September 11th was quite the introduction to a certain part of the world for a teenager watching the news at the time.

 

[JM Aggie08]

6th grade, Mrs. George's reading class. There ended up being early release that day, in which we headed straight to the bank (ma, sister, myself) to pull out a decent amount of cash, just in case. My dad works at the airport, and it was complete chaos. If I recall, they shut everything down and he was able to head home.

 

[pauldun170]

In my office in midtown, right over Grand Central station.
When the towers fell and out systems went kaput (because we had a datacenter in one of the towers) half the crew was focused on heading off to a contingency site to get our stuff back on line (coworker had to lug a big ole proliant server onto metro north).
I eventually left with a co-worker and we headed downtown to see if there was anything we could do to help such as donate blood. As we passed Penn Station, noticed that they started operating again and then just headed home.

 

[mmntech]

I was in 11th grade at the time. Had first period off as a spare so I knew the plane had hit. Went to my second period accounting class, then came back home for lunch. That's when I found out the towers had collapsed. No really dramatic hushed phone call to the teacher or sending the kids home early like in the States. We finished the school day as normal. Though everything had a strange vibe to it. A lot of Canadians died in that attack. Then I found out who had done it and why. It removed every shred of doubt I had about God and religion. I became an atheist that day.

What stuck me most in the immediate aftermath was when they grounded all flights. I lived under a flight path for planes landing at Pearson. First day of my life where I've never saw them flying overhead. Was eerily quiet.

Skip ahead few years later and I actually went to university with members of the infamous Toronto 18. The group of radical Muslim students that had been planning terror attacks in Toronto and Ottawa. We all knew there was a radical element on that campus. You'd see girls going around in the full niqab and what not. Nobody really talked about it though. So much for all their efforts towards building cultural understanding. Doesn't work if it only goes one way.

 

[rh71]

you should do a search on this topic.

My dad came into my room and told me to turn on my tv. First tower already on fire. I went into work at 10am-ish and sat in the NOC with other people watching it all unfold on the big screens. My manager's husband was on a high-floor and we didn't know if he made it out for the longest time - but thankfully he did. Other friends also made it out. Someone I went to HS with died that day though.

My now-wife walked home from Manhattan on the Brooklyn Bridge along with many many others.

 

[LegendKiller]

In business school. A year later in would meet the first person I knew who was there. She was in a tower for a meeting with some clients in the south tower. She barely escaped, running away from the debris cloud when the building fell. She heard bodies fall as she was exiting the building. She moved out of nyc after that, it was too much for her.

Worked with a woman whose husband was a first responder. He and 2 friends left to help, the two friends never came back.

Worked with another guy who was at a Japanese bank in the south tower. They all left when the north tower was hit. They got down to the sky lobby and their Japanese boss told them to go back up stairs since nothing had happened. My coworker and a friend kept going down anyway. His entire team died and he survived because of that decision. When the plane hit the south tower he said the stairwell shook like a rope ladder and everybody fell. They got back up and hurried down.

Lots of stories like that.

I was at the top of the ESB, in the 2nd bank of elevators, when the East Coast Blackout hit. I had to walk down the entire thing, the whole time wondering if this was a larger attack, whether being in the tallest building in Manhattan made us a target.

 

[kranky]

We were having a big off-site management meeting at a hotel with about 40 people. We took a break about 90 minutes in and in the hotel lobby there was a crowd of people silently staring at the TV. So a bunch of us joined the crowd at the TV. Just before the break was scheduled to end the 2nd tower was hit. By then everyone knew something real bad was happening. Break ends, we have to go back to the conference room, dazed. Our CEO hadn't seen the TV but someone briefed him quickly.

He picked up on the mood of the room and decided to cancel the meeting, we should go back to the office. By the time we got to the office the radio was reporting a plane approaching Pittsburgh that was not responding to radio (this turned out to be Flight 93) and we figured it was going to be crashed as well, just hoping it wasn't where we were. In the office, radios tuned to news everywhere, nothing getting done.

Around lunchtime people just started trickling out and heading home. Almost no conversation, you could only hear radios broadcasting.

 

[Sonikku]

I was a senior in high school. Some of the teachers looked at the tv with composed concern. Others were so flippy their voices were crazily pitched. I remember being in the library when one of the students said "The tower's collapsing" and all the other students scrambled over to the tv to watch.