Anyone remember where they were or what they were doing on 9/11?

[Marcus Aurelius]

I remember it like it was yesterday, and I'm not even an American.

Woke up, walked out into the living room expecting to just get ready for school as usual, my father is ironing my uniform and he immediately says to me "look at that", and I turned to the TV and saw a replay of the North Tower collapsing, and my first response was "oh cool, what movie is this?" and Dad responded "that isn't a movie, it's real life".

The replay transitioned to Flight 175 striking the South Tower, and that's when the stunned horror took hold. I flopped onto the couch and just sat there mouth agape for about half an hour. Didn't eat breakfast.

When I arrived at school about an hour later, it was all anyone was talking about, and this was the 6th grade. The faculty called a special assembly for the 6th graders only (we were the oldest group on campus, an elementary school) and they did all the typical things, offering counseling for those who wanted it and encouraged us as the oldest students to look after the younger ones and to keep a look out for any that looked troubled. To his credit, the principal was very frank with us despite our age. He said "I won't lie to you, what we have seen today is a horrible bit of history, and you may now be growing up in a different world to the one you knew."

How right he was. To people my age (30 years or older) it feels like two different lives, the one before September 11th 2001, and the one after.

 

[LegendX48]

I'm in (Southern) California, for context. Anywho:

In school, I think either at lunch or recess. I vaguely remember some teachers being kinda... dour I spose.

For context, I think I was in 6th grade at the time, that or 5th. All us kids just went about business as usual and went back to class for the rest of the day like normal.

 

[Nilou]

I was in 5th grade, in class at the time. I remember another teacher coming into the classroom and having our teacher talk to them in the hall. After about 10 minutes they sent us home and after walking home I saw my mother glued to the tv. I didn't really understand a whole lot of what was going on at the time but I knew it was something serious.

 

[vypek]

I was registered for school late so it was my first day of school but the 4th day overall. I was in 6th grade. My social studies teacher told us the news but I guess cause we didn't see the news or anything, we didn't really feel the impact or think about it even though our teacher was clearly upset and distraught. We weren't sent home early though. We just continued the day as normal until normal dismissal.

 

[Aeana]

Sitting in my office chatting on IRC, watching TV on my little old 13 incher. I watched it happen live then.

 

[StrangeRoboMemory]

High school morning, Miami.

 

[TateRaken]

I remember that day pretty clearly, I was in high school. I had just finished up US History and they told us to stay in our classes when the bell rang, then the teacher turned on the TV and the news reports came in, saying a plain had hit one of the twin towers in new york, and we watched it live and then another plane smashes into the other building and everyone was just horrified. My parents took off work and took us out of school super early that day.

 

[Satori]

Woke up to get ready for work at my first job. I was dead tired from staying up and gaming all night. Got to work and everyone just stop and watched.

I was really worried because my uncle works at the tower. About mid day my mom called and said they still have not got in contact with my uncle and asked me to come home.

Work let me go home early to be with my family and I was speeding and got pulled over. The cop asked my why I was speeding. Told him and he let me go and just told me to be safe and good luck.

Turns out my uncle skipped work to go fishing...

 

[Prototype Viktor]

Driving to work in north houston and just sitting around with nothing to do while a random person stayed around with a radio listening to reports

 

[kirby_fox]

8th grade American history class. Principal comes over the intercom and tells teachers to turn on the news. My teacher was confused, turned on the old TV and the fuzzy picture was that a plane hit the WTC. Confused more, he shrugged, then the TV off and continued his lesson.

We weren't sent home early. They wheeled a TV into the gym. I was doing some physical fitness test when the first tower fell. I don't think another teacher turned it on after that as worse news came in. Only my English teacher turned the news on not wanting to shield us, but he didn't turn it on for long. I remember it was one of the Al Queda leaders saying it was them. After that I didn't see anything until I got home. Watched news for a bit at home and then went up to the basketball court to shoot for a bit.

It was my brother's birthday so I think we did something for him that night. Next day there were rumors about why they wouldn't let teachers talk about it. Someone having family die up there or because there were firefighters who died and they didn't want to upset any kids whose parents were also firefighters.

 

[Zulith]

I had stayed up all the previous night playing games or something, woke up around noon, turned on tv and watched the coverage all day. Boring story, but I'd prefer boring considering the subject at hand... RIP all those innocent people.

 

[Lotto]

middle school right before school the first tower was hit and then when i got to my first class (math) we didn't do much of anything else but watch the telly. i distinctly remember my teacher with her giant coffee mug and downing it while shaking her head staring intensely at the news.

 

[LiquidDom]

That's crazy. I always feel like I had a memory of a plane flying low that day, but I'm not sure. Where did you live at the time? My father worked in scrap metal, so when 9/11 was done he was one of the companies that went over to ground zero to buy the scrap metal. He took two pieces of ground zero home, still have it.

Click to shrink...

I lived in Carteret at the time, Exit 12 off the Turnpike. What about you?

 

[The Real Abed]

Getting ready for work. Then going to work and telling everyone what happened. Then having to stay up front to man the registers while everyone else went to the back to watch the news.

 

[David Addison]

So that morning I was starting up my dialup internet connection (this was eons ago, of course) and for the first and only time I got...not a busy signal, but an "all circuits are busy" error message. Thought nothing of it, until I visited www.cnn.com and the front page looked like it had been hacked by a drunken maniac, with a gigantic AMERICA UNDER ATTACK headline. The more you learned, the worse it got.

Two months later I bought a shiny new digicam and visited the WTC wreckage (the area had already become a tourist trap):

Spoiler: NYC 12/2001

 

[eraFROMAN]

6th grade, teacher started bawling in class then we were sent home; weird day to remember

 

[Famicom]

Fresh out of high school that spring, I arrived to work downtown Chicago at my first job just as it happened. Office went from a few murmurs to some light panic, as we watched the news in the conference room. Someone said there were rumors that the Sears Tower was a potential target, and given that our building was two blocks from it we got permission to go home. The Metra train ride home was absolutely packed, but the ride was free just to get people out of the metro area.

Once I got home I turned to CNN on the tv and hit up IRC chat rooms to participate in some live discourse (was pretty much unreadable though, things were moving too fast). That's how I spent the rest of the day.

 

[Deleted member 4212]

I think it was second period in high school. Our history teacher just showed the news on a TV in class and we were allowed to go home before lunch.

One gas station near my house raised gas prices to like $10/gallon and I think they got fined into closing for it a few weeks later.

 

[RCSI]

Making a sandwich, getting ready for high school when the first plane hit. Obvious it was intentional. No one really talked about it at school from what I remember, just televisions on in select rooms at the time.

 

[Olorin]

I was at the office. The windows of my office building had a straight unobstructed view of the towers. I was late that day and heard there was a possible helicopter crashed into one of the buildings. I looked out the window and saw smoke from rising from one of the towers. We all continued to work as if a bad accident occurred.

Moments later, someone managed to pull up cnn and the office slowly started realizing what was happening. We were all sent home as soon as word spread.

 

[Quick]

I was in bed, ready to sleep. CNN was on TV and I could hear the events unfolding live. Eventually, I dozed off.

For context, I was living halfway across the world at the time. Woke up on the 12th and the vibe was different going to school, it was all anyone could talk about, and security measures ramped up as well. Felt like pre-9/11 was a different time entirely. Literally closed my eyes to sleep and the world changed.

 

[Morrigan]

I was in the computer lab at college.

Click to shrink...

Same. I was wrapping it up and when I left the lab, people were huddled around the TVs scattered across the school, which was airing news of the first collapse in the morning. There was still uncertainty as to whether it was an attack or some crazy-ass accident.

When the 2nd plane hit everyone went "holy shit WAT" and it was all everyone talked about for the rest of the day. I distinctly remember a classmate saying, very very naively, that "meh everyone will have forgotten about this event in a few weeks and will have moved on to the next thing" and I told him it was crazy, that this was huge news. He just shrugged. I bet he felt silly after.

 

[evil solrac v3.0]

My brother worked at tower 7 and 388 Greenwich for Smith barney and I went to school in midtown. A classmates friend was killed. Saw lots of people covered in blood and dust. I may still have burnt pieces of paper with the date from companies inside the towers, That landed all the way in my home in Brooklyn.

when I got home at night, the house was covered in dust. Where I lived in park slope I could see the towers out of my kitchen window. The only thing I could see for the next two weeks was dust.

before we came here to resetera, there was a member of neogaf, good cow who had archived the forum posts of that day, back when it was known as gaming age. I posted that day freaking out not knowing where my brother was. Same user name.

 

[I am a Bird]

I was in my basement doing math homework, I think I was doing multiplication problems with 3 digits. Mom told me to run upstairs and I cam in seeing the World Trade Center smoking, then a second plane hit.

 

[mrmickfran]

I was at day care watching the news on tv

 

[Rirse]

In high school in my accounting class. Just a average day when the teacher turn on the tv on. That was a scary night since I didn't know what was going to happen next.

 

[Heynongman!]

Yep, I was outside the library at my elementary school when a friend came and told me and a few others what happened. Me being a child I didn't understand the gravity so I'm pretty sure I said something like "who cares?" It wasn't until I started my morning library assistant shift and saw the tv that it sunk in. I managed to catch the second tower fall and it's stuck with me ever since. You truly don't forget

 

[Ribbon]

I was in the fourth grade. They turned off the classroom lights in my school, and all the televisions in the classrooms turned on and showed us the live footage. I was horrified.

 

[Rotobit]

So that morning I was starting up my dialup internet connection (this was eons ago, of course) and for the first and only time I got...not a busy signal, but an "all circuits are busy" error message. Thought nothing of it, until I visited www.cnn.com and the front page looked like it had been hacked by a drunken maniac, with a gigantic AMERICA UNDER ATTACK headline. The more you learned, the worse it got.

Two months later I bought a shiny new digicam and visited the WTC wreckage (the area had already become a tourist trap):

Spoiler: NYC 12/2001

Click to shrink...

Wow it's weird seeing things like this at a relatively high resolution

Wonder if those memorials were archived in any way, I feel like they're a valuable a snapshot of the event

 

[stressboy]

I was in the shower. My wife, fiance at the time, knocked on the door and came in. She said her mom called and said we were under attack, and that the White House had been evacuated.

I quickly got out and she was in the living room with the news on. Saw video of a plane crashing into the WTC.

Our generations Pearl Harbor.

 

[nded]

Middle school, English class. I remember the teacher interrupted class to tune in to the news.

 

[PlanetSmasher]

I was in English class my sophomore year of high school. I had basically just sat down when the news got turned on.

 

[A Regular Bear]

Science lab freshman year. Took a good hour to sink in. Obviously every class skipped the lesson for the day so we could focus on it, although my history teacher wanted to give us a crash course on Al-Qaeda and what to expect in the aftermath.

 

[Traxus]

Following the events on Something Awful.

 

[sven]

Stocking the toy section at Target. I was in the back getting another pallet when the radio morning show they had on back there started talking about a plane hitting one of the towers. At first I just wrote it off as a small personal plane that probably didn't do much damage. Clearly I was wrong.

 

[Croc Man]

UK. Got home from school and my mum looked shaken saying there'd been a terrorist attack in America. I couldn't work out why she was upset, there were regular terror attacks on the news and it never bothered her that much, then I saw the TV and understood.

So watched the news for a while, the newsreaders still using the language of accidents, to the collapse, didn't seem real. Wondered what was next.

What was next was going to watch football in the evening, that was a weird atmosphere.

 

[sirap]

I was in a hotel in Malaysia. We were visiting my mother's family. My parents knew we (muslims) were fucked, and my dad made plans to move us to Malaysia permanently.

 

[Pyramid Head]

I was in Liverpool city centre doing some shopping with my then girlfriend. I had made the last payment on an Ibanez guitar I had been saving for and she had come to pick up a few bits for new student flat she was moving into for university. We were in a shop on Bold street called Chandler's which sold tupperware and general brick-a-brack when the homeless guy from the corner burst in shouting, "They've done a kamikaze!"
The person behind the counter turned on the TV and we saw what was happening. Crazy day.

 

[MIMIC]

10th grade (high school) in Cleveland, Ohio.

Arrived in my algebra class and I saw that the teacher had the TV on (I didn't even know it worked). At that point, both buildings had been hit. She continued to teach the class with the TV on. In my next class (French), the teacher just let us watch the news for the entire period. That's when we heard about the Pentagon.

Schools were closed the next day.

 

[Star Wild eo]

I was in 9th grade English class in a Christian school in Florida when we first started hearing rumblings of what was going on. At first, I think the teachers were asked to keep it hush hush as to not cause mass panic, but our teacher didn't care and let us know an overview of what was going on. By third period, Bible class, it was impossible to hide and they let us know. Obviously everyone was freaked out.

Being a Christian school, I remember there was a lot of bible reading and praying going on. Lots of talk of this being the start of the end times and that the rapture would start soon. After that, it was all a blur. Parents started picking up their kids and basically classes were cancelled but the ones that weren't picked up just watched what was going on in the cafeteria. Ended up staying till the end of the school day and when I got home, my aunt and uncle were pretty sure that this was the start of World War 3 so I remember that making me extremely nervous.

It was all super surreal.

 

[Gr8one]

I was in my second week of my first year of University. I had just woken up got up to get ready for school and turned on my computer and was checking some channel I frequented on IRC at the time and the topic was something like "WW3 is happening". I was like wtf and turned on the news just in time to see the second plane hit.

I didn't go to school that day or the next. Fucked me up pretty bad at the time, still can remember it vividly. It was a scary time especially living alone for the first time and being a very young adult.

 

[chrominance]

Canadian, second year of university. I had an early class that day, and then an empty period before my next class, so I was chilling at the apartment i shared with four other people. The partner of one of my roommates called and wanted to know where he was--he was at class and not around at the moment. She told us to turn on the TV, because planes had hit the WTC. Didn't really believe it at first, but every channel had live video of the towers on fire.

Spent most of the rest of the day in my room, glued to the TV and frantically refreshing the WTC thread on Metafilter as reports from NYC and elsewhere came in. Don't recall if I saw the second strike live but I did see the towers collapse. The news reports that day were all over the place with unconfirmed reports; the wildest one that turned out to be false was that potentially up to 10 planes (or maybe more?) in the air had been hijacked with the intention to attack other targets. Nearby cities were shutting down, including Toronto (which really didn't seem like a likely target but no one would dare take a chance).

I went to one class later that day, and the prof basically told us to go home and watch the news, that was our coursework for the day. 9/11 I think was the first time I'd really started to think about politics; shortly after that there were retribution attacks on American mosques and that seemed so obviously wrong but I didn't really have a framework to place that feeling in context at the time, and did a whole lot of reading to make sense of it.

I'd been to NYC for the first time just a year and a half prior, on a senior-year high school trip. I remember standing in line in the lobby of one of the twin towers to buy off-Broadway tickets from tkts. It was one of the first things we did that trip and the only time I ever visited the World Trade Center. The next time I was even in the area was a decade and a bit later, by which point the whole area was a huge construction pit. Thought about going to the memorial museum but it felt kind of macabre to do so as a tourist.

 

[JoeNut]

Year 7 in the UK (which is about 11 years old)
I remember hearing people talking about something as I left school and after the walk home I turned on the TV and every single channel was showing the first tower smouldering. Im pretty sure I saw the second tower get hit live.
The memory that sticks is seeing people jumping from the windows, they were just showing them jump live on TV, it was really fucked up.

 

[Herb Alpert]

In France it was in the afternoon. I was watching perfect blue that I had rent. I was 22, still in my parents' house (Yeah I know, I left the year after)
When the movie was over, I ended up on images of the burning wtc. I couldn't stop watching for the next 5 or so hours...

 

[Seth Balmore]

I was 15. It was 3 in the afternoon in Spain, I must've had a quick lunch because I remember getting ready to go to the beach with some friends. My mother was standing in front of the TV with a shocked face, so I went to see. For the first few seconds, my brain processed this like "I must be watching a movie". We didn't go to the beach.

 

[Deleted member 14518]

I'd been traveling around OZ and NZ for the year with my then gf. We finished up in San Fran on 10th and got on our plane home for Ireland. Woke up the next day and was watching news eating breakfest - I think it was sky news - and then they said breaking news a plane had hit the first tower. They had live footage of the burning etc when the second plane hit. Gobsmacked.

We were suppose to fly out the 14th or something but had moved our dates because we were broke.

 

[Arex]

Yeah watching TV in my parent's bedroom (it was around 8pm local time I think) when it switched to breaking news. Thought it was pretty crazy something like that could happen back then. Didn't really personally affect our lives as we're very far away (Indonesia) and I was pretty young (15-16yo I think). But it definitely had effect on increasing Islamic extremism in our country though, which probably contributed to the 2002 Bali bombing. I always felt our country was more tolerant before then.

 

[superpickleman]

I remember finding out about it as I was walking into middle school in the morning. One of my teachers was walking by and asked if we had heard about what happened as he walked toward the building his classroom was in. I had no idea what he was talking about until I got to my first period and that teacher explained what had occurred. I can't remember if we were watching it on the TV in class or not.

I distinctly remember not being too worried about it. I was mostly being annoyed that I couldn't find cartoons to watch since we didn't have cable and all the local channels were covering the attack. My parents took me and my sister to buy a puppy the next day out of the blue. I thought it was just a really awesome birthday present that came out of the blue, but now that I'm older I realize that they got it for us to take our minds off the situation as I'm certain they were concerned about it.

 

[wenis]

On neogaf and something awful

 

[KimiNewt]

Israel, 9 years old. At home after school watching cartoons or whatever, my sister bursts into the living room from her room and tells me to change the channel to the news.
I think it was after the second plane has hit, just cuz I have a vague picture of it. I just remember thinking "yeah okay whatever, if you change to the news that's what you'll see-- a terrorist attack" (growing up during the intifada and all) and didn't give it much mind.
It made a big impact on my sister (she was in HS), but for me it was just a blip. I only remember those couple of minutes and nothing else.