Where were you on 11 September 2001?

[cpzilliacus]

I was supervising a check of HOV utilization on I-66 in Arlington County, Virginia that morning. 

We knew something was wrong when we started seeing an unendeing stream of emergency vehicles headed east on I-66 in the direction of the Pentagon, especially when those vehicles were coming from as far away as Washington Dulles International Airport and Montgomery County, Maryland.

[1995hoo]

I was at my office in downtown DC at 13th & G Streets, about three blocks from the White House. After the Pentagon was hit we were all naturally concerned, but I saw little point in racing to head home because the streets were gridlocked. You know the scene in the movie Independence Day where the alien spacecraft appears over New York and the city streets instantly come to gridlock? That's how 9-11 was downtown except there weren't all the rear-endings.

Called my cousin who lives in the Red Bank area of New Jersey. Her husband worked across the street from One World Trade Center and none of us could reach him. Turned out he had taken the day off to play golf with a friend. One of our aunts was stuck on the subway under the East River for over two hours. One my mother's cousins was in one of the Twin Towners but made it out OK. She had also been there when the bomb went off some years earlier and she has sworn never to enter the new building because she figures she's used up her luck.

Left work around 1:30 when the traffic died down and took a roundabout way home because my normal route on I-395 went right past the Pentagon and I assumed it might be blocked with emergency vehicles (turned out it wasn't, but who knew).

Got home and felt lost as to what to do for the day. It was a beautiful sunny day (very much like today, actually.....it's 63°F outside as I type this), so I went for a walk around the lake near our house and that's when the eerie silence struck me. No aircraft flying over. We sometimes get planes heading to Reagan Airport if they're approaching from the south, but there was no aircraft noise at all that day with US airspace shut down and it was a really weird sensation.

[Dr Frankenstein]

Elementary school, grade 6. Learned it when some students came back from lunch at home. "Oh, a plane crashed into the twin towers in New York." Didn't know those, didn't make a big deal out of it, until I came back home and Pokémon was cancelled. I then realized it was important.

[oscar]

Just to avoid repetition -- something like this thread has showed up around many recent 9/11 anniversaries -- my comments are at https://www.aaroads.com/forum/index.php?topic=3468.25 near the bottom of the page.

[kphoger]

I was at work in a warehouse, in my boss's office.  The janitor was in there, and we were chatting for a bit.  As he was leaving, he said, 'By the way, did you hear they bombed the twin towers and the Pentagon?' and walked out of the room.  That was kind of weird.  I ended up being the one to share the news with my coworkers.  We had the news on the radio, and then eventually the whole company gathered in the chapel to watch TV coverage on the projector and to pray.

My dad and I were planning a trip in December.  I watched the price of plane tickets take a nose dive, but I foolishly kept waiting to see if they would go lower.  Eventually they climbed back up, and I kicked myself for not buying in time.  Then, before December, our itinerary changed about three times as the airline started straightening itself back out again.

[Takumi]

I was a sophomore in high school, and the first plane crash happened late in 2nd period. Between 2nd and 3rd, word got out around the school that someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center. "Huh, how did that happen?" was the general reaction of students. After 3rd, news of the other crashes got out, and my 4th period teacher was visibly shaken because she had a relative who worked at the Pentagon.

[english si]

I was in a 'citizenship' lesson (a sign of the decline in the UK - Government mandated lessons on how to be a good citizen, by a populist Labour Government - not that the Tories wouldn't have also done likewise - in fact it would be a far more typically Tory initiative than a New Labour one). Being the first Tuesday afternoon of the year, and the first year it was demanded, it was the school's first lesson in the subject.

Our teacher (who was a PE teacher who got lumbered with it) didn't have a clue what to teach as there was no syllabus, just that we needed, by law, to be taught a certain amount of it each week (along with Personal, Social & Heath Education, Religious Studies/Ethics, Physical Education and Sport that we didn't necessarily take exams in - the latter two were an hour a week, and the others added up to an hour and a half a week, so we had an hour period each week that was effectively do nothing but watching DVDs and occasionally , rotating what it was meant to be called so we did enough if you also some of our counted our assembly times).

We discussed what it meant to be a good citizen. Most of that was, ironically, keeping up with the news. Our next (and 5th and final) period of the day, we heard it from other boys who had spent their PSHE/RS class (6 groups, 2 slots in the week, so 3 groups that Tuesday afternoon - one on each of the 'well, we have to' subjects, rotating every half term) doing what we were only talking about. I think I had English, which means that one of the first people I heard the news from would later be arrested (and released without charge) for terror offences. We thought they were joking. I heard some mention of it on the radio in a shop on the way home, still didn't really know what had happened. Turned on the TV and couldn't keep away from watching the 24h news for a good few evenings.

Of course, we made lots of fun of the teacher the next week - he walked into it by saying "this time last week, the Twin Towers fell, and we were talking about keeping abreast of the news - so what's happened since?" "I don't know sir, I was too busy talking about keeping abreast of the news to actually watch it - perhaps you should ask the people in the other classes who simply turned on the telly, rather than talk about watching the news" "I was too busy wondering what a good citizen was to actually be one, sir." etc. Being  in our final year of compulsory education and as everyone in the room thought the subject was a joke in terms of needing lessons in it and as there was no exam, we had a good bit of banter about it.

[agentsteel53]

you have to call your teachers "sir"?

blecccch.

[cpzilliacus]

I was a sophomore in high school, and the first plane crash happened late in 2nd period. Between 2nd and 3rd, word got out around the school that someone crashed a plane into the World Trade Center. "Huh, how did that happen?" was the general reaction of students. After 3rd, news of the other crashes got out, and my 4th period teacher was visibly shaken because she had a relative who worked at the Pentagon.

I had a good friend who worked in the Historical Office at the Pentagon (sadly, he has since died, but he was not injured in the attack on the building). 

[english si]

We didn't have to (past tense - I mean this was 11 years ago), but first names would have got you in trouble if you used them unless in 11th/12th grade equivalents, and we would have been the equivalent of Sophomores. Which was fine - we typically didn't need to use a name when addressing teachers in class - adding 'Sir' at the end made it obvious we were mocking him and that he was meant to be the example of citizenship.

Typically when outside the classroom, we went "Mr/Mrs/Miss Surname" if there was more than one teacher there. A couple of them had nicknames that we could use with them and many had nicknames that we couldn't use in front of them. Among students, just like Harry Potter, we used surnames with no title to refer to teachers - unless they had amusing nicknames (like TOG - teacher of geography - who was HOG (head of) until retiring as department head. The teachers (relatively) tolerated that one - even the man himself). The citizenship teacher in question was our Head of Year. Behind his back, we called him TWIG - Trevor Whitby Is Gay (for his name was Trevor Whitby) - no idea why, but it stuck.

I live around the corner from the person who played the piano for choir at my Elementary (equivalent) school. I left there in '98, but I still struggle to call her Teresa, rather than Mrs Game (which confuses people when I use her first name, to avoid falling into the habit of calling her Mrs Game - almost everyone in town knows her as Mrs Game). Other teachers that are friends of my parents/that I see from time to time I also struggle to call them anything else but "Mr/Mrs Surname", despite knowing their first names.

My Div (division) Teacher in VIth form (11th/12th grades - not compulsory), who had gone to school in the late 50s/early 60s at similarly top state school that behaves like it is a top private school other than asking for money for tuition, had a system that shows the change that occurred as we left our uniforms behind and donned suits. He'd call every younger boy 'Surname' all the time, but VIth formers he called 'Mr Surname' as a sign of respect as long as we called him "Mr Binns" as a sign of mutual respect, rather than calling him "Peter". I imagine if we had girls, they would always be 'Miss Surname', whatever their age, but neither he or we went to a secondary school with girls in. The teacher-pupil barrier was broken and we didn't really get punished with detention. We still called our teachers what we always did as we were used to it though they used nicknames for us and didn't get wound up if we used their first name (which we rarely did in classroom settings, but outside we might).

[formulanone]

I worked at the University of Florida part-time; Tuesdays meant typing up reports and gearing up for inventory that normally takes up a good bit of the day. At about 9am, I got a call from my wife at her work...she said, turn on the TV, apparently a plane has hit the WTC, but we don't know a thing over here (no TVs)...she had heard over the radio at her work. I imagined a wretched little Cessna had somehow hit the observation deck...but this was not the case, of course. I go to get coffee nearby, and about 10 of us are looking up at the TV screen, remarking about the "accident". Suddenly, as were watching live TV, the other tower is struck...I felt a horrible pain my stomach; I felt like I was going to vomit and I felt cold; never before had I ever felt like that.

Nobody said a word for about a minute, and that felt really strange and I think we all felt a weird kind of despair. More students and faculty showed up for a snack, and the channels replayed the same footage again and again, just more people that were shocked. Soon, there's 300-400 people in the food court, and you could hear a pin drop except for the sounds of the TV. Normally all the students and faculty are eating, drinking, talking, and kitchen and service equipment is making enough of a racket that it's hard to hear yourself think. But today, other than the TV...it is nearly silent; the odd whisper or sniffle is the only other thing you can hear. It is the worst kind of silence...nobody wanted to eat and nobody knew how to feel; most of these students were just kids, essentially.

I'm working on the reports, when my supervisor's boss comes in, his face is white. He never talks to any of us about non-work-related things, all business; and when I mean talks, I mean shouting and arguing. He remarks that one of the towers has collapsed, and people were inside of it. In a little while, I go to a TV and see that the other tower has fallen. It just got worse, and worse, and worse...news crews are replaying of what has happened.

By 12 noon, students are told to go home or back to their dormitories, to leave ASAP. Faculty leaves as well, and many people working around the campus have left as well. All the catering events have been canceled for the day, and everything was re-scheduled until further notice. I had taken the bus to work (Tuesdays are also the toughest day to get a parking space, so I could take the bus for free), and the ride back was silent as well, but instead of the usual packed container, it had about 6-7 people in it. Two people were whispering about the world never being the same, others were just crying. I sat towards the front and just looked at my feet all the way to my stop.

[amroad17]

I was on a expedited run from Cincinnati to Edison, NJ.  Listening to the radio near St. Clairsville, OH is when I first heard about the AA plane hitting the North Trade Tower.  Before I reached Wheeling, my wife called about the United plane hitting the South Trade Tower with the words, "This is the beginning of the end."  Stopped in Bentleyville, PA to call my parents and see the North Tower fall.  I ended up continuing on my trip after an hour.

While driving around Harrisburg, PA, the portable VMS's had the text "N.Y. CITY CLOSED". 

I continued to my destination--only to find they had closed at 11 AM that morning.  Found a motel near Trenton and watched the coverage on TV.  Did not actually see what happened until 8:30 that evening.

[kphoger]

The creator of digihitch–a hitchhiking web forum and info launchpad–was hitchhiking cross-country on his way to New York, I think to visit family.  Since he was sleeping outdoors and without radio or TV, he was completely unaware of the 9/11 attacks, but wondered why people kept looking at his NYC hitchhiking sign with such strange faces.  Apparently not very many people were going to New York at that time....

[kphoger]

I was working about 25—30 miles from downtown Chicago, but my mom still called to say she was thinking about me in case they attacked Chicago as well.  She knew on a rational level, of course, that it was rather silly, but she called nonetheless.  One of my closest coworkers was married to a lady who worked next door to the Sears Tower.  She had a slight mental handicap and didn't fully comprehend the situation, and he determined that it wasn't worth it to fully explain things, lest the knowledge immobilize her and she be unable to go to work.  A foreign exchange student I had known in high school was working at the McDonald's in the twin towers at that time.  On the 11th, he decided not to go to work that day, for no apparent reason.  It was a good decision.

[DTComposer]

I sleep with the radio on to talk or sports, and awoke (West Coast time) to ESPN Radio alternating between stunned, scared and trying to maintain some composure. Since I lived right next to the Ports of Long Beach/Los Angeles, and knew that might be a potential target in a full-scale attack, I went to work several hours early, but didn't do anything that day but take in the news and track down friends in NYC. Fortunately, no one I knew was injured or killed in New York, but it turned out that two of the Flight 93 passengers that fought back went to high school with me (a couple years ahead) and played rugby with my brother.

[vdeane]

I was in grade 5 of elementary school.  We didn't cancel class or anything, just had the TVs on for about 30-60min at the start of the day (school started at 9:10).  Since I didn't know anyone who lived or worked in NYC, nor did anyone else in the family, and since I had never even heard of the twin towers before 9/11, a lot of the symbolic meaning of the event was lost on me, and to this day the world looks the same to me post-9/11 as it does pre-9/11, so a lot of the changes that have happened in response seem weird to me (the best way I can put it without politicizing this thread).

[Beltway]

I was working on the 19th floor of the James Monroe Building in Richmond VA when it happened.  After first notice, we saw news reports on Internet newspapers, and video feeds.  Then the news of the Pentagon attack came.  I felt it was rather unlikely that Richmond would be attacked, but rather than take any chance, I headed out of downtown Richmond within a half hour and went home.  TV news a couple hours later said that the tall buildings in the downtown were ordered evacuated.

[triplemultiplex]

In my dorm room as a first year college student.  I only had one class on Tuesdays that first semester (most of 'em were MWF).  I went, but all we did was discuss the situation.  So I spent most of the day just watching TV since I didn't have my own computer at that point in my life.  Just about every cable channel was piping in their parent company's news feed so it was unavoidable.  Not that I wanted to watch something else.

[NE2]

Reading "the pet goat" to a second-grade class.

[bugo]

I don't remember.

[Alps]

Feeding my second grade class to a pet goat.

[roadman65]

I was home and it was my day off of work.  I slept late and heard my family in the next room in awe about a plane crashing into both twin towers.   I was in my car driving to Tampa later when I heard on the radio (all Orlando stations were broadcasting one of the network news coverage at the time) from the late Peter Jennings on WHTQ when both towers fell.  I remember when the north tower collapsed and Mr. Jennings was speechless.

Later on when President Bush spoke to the nation after the tragedies, I was in the Tampa Winghouse when all televisions were tuned in to the horror.  All were quite when the President spoke and I can remember him calling the attackers cowards.

[agentsteel53]

being a pet goat and finding myself fed to second graders.

[Beltway]

Reading "the pet goat" to a second-grade class.

You were playing with the pet goat.

[kphoger]

He was "petting" a second grader's "goat".  Nudge nudge, wink wink.

Am I the only one out there who is starting to feel old?  It seems like everyone was still in school on 9/11.  Even the radio announcer today mentioned being in school on 9/11.  I AM NOT OLD YET.  What is happening?