where were you on 9/11/2001

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I was at work and it was a fairly sunny day.
My boss grabbed a TV from out back and we ended up just watching the live reports for the rest of the afternoon.
Didn't seem real at the time!

46th and 10th avenue. I have no belief in god/s

I was in bed sleeping and the first thing my dad does when he gets me up for school was "They are talking about planes crashing" and I didn't really give a f**k. I didn't understand why he was telling me about some planes crashing. I didn't really care to know what was going on out in the world and the fact I was tired and he tells me this two more times before I shout at him. Then I get out of bed and saw the two towers were on fire and I thought nothing of it except it sucks how a plane had to crash into them. I didn't even know it was all planned or intentional and that we were all under attack until I got to school and was in choir. I mean really, was it really a coincidence that two planes can crash on the same day in the same location? That is why is was such a big deal than a random plane crashing somewhere. All day long we had to listen to it and there was no school work for a few days, it was only sitting in class with that TV on listening to the event and my culinary art teacher was stranded in Mexico because she was down there when it happened so we had a sub for a while. I can remember feeling angry when I finally understood what was going on and feeling disgusted when I heard some country celebrating our attacks because a bunch of innocent people died and they were glad?

I get that. Imagine how I felt when I walked out of my apartment and saw some people chanting and celebrating just after the attacks. People died of every faith. The people who claimed it was for Islam didn't care that they were killing Muslims.

I don't understand anybody celebrating any loss of life or infliction of pain and suffering. There are some truly twisted people out there.

I was in the middle of a day at work when it happened, due to the UK time difference.

I worked as the stores person in the local unemployment benefits office, so I was the only person in the building that had a radio and could follow what was going on. Nothing in the office could stop in sympathy with the awful news, as the benefits payment system would have collapsed, so I spent the day trying to take in what was happening, and keep the 100+ other employees up to date with events as they happened.

When the first plane hit, it was reported as a horrible, but very unfortunate, accident. It was only when the second plane hit the towers, and reports of the other hi-jackings came in, that it became obvious that something far more sinister was happening. I remember there being a lot of tearful people doing their best to carry on working

Probably in a crib or playpen.

That one country hated our country so they were happy that we got attacked because they felt we deserved it. I don't remember which country it was. It was a country I had never even heard of. But I hear they weren't the only ones. But I certainly didn't feel happy when we attacked Hiroshima because it killed a bunch of innocent people and made unborn children sick because they had caught it from their mothers who were sick from it. But I wonder if any Americans ever celebrated it. I can understand why we did it but I never felt the need to celebrate it either.

I was having lectures at university. On my way home I popped in to see my mother and found her in a state of chock. Her belief in a reasonably stable world had been shattered.

I dread the next one.

Yep - what else can I say? Were not exactly heading the right way at the moment.

Some young people don't know what the World Trade Center buildings looked like. They were the 2nd and 3rd tollest buildings in the country.

If you have read my diagnosis story you know that well before I was diagnosed I had a boss who said I was a little bit autistic, but that I dismissed it as his weird attempt at bullying. This was where I was working at during September 2001. It was a very small computer repair company with under 10 employees. I was the programmer. We did have clients we modified a software package for. It was located 15 miles from ground zero.

They talk about that day as being a perfect day weatherwise. It really was. In America the Labor Day weekend the first weekend in September separates summer vacation season from the back to work, back to school season. The massive increase in traffic is noticeable. I remember thinking to myself that morning on my way to work all these people are probably wishing they were still on vacation.

Being the klutz I am my boss did not trust me with the keys to the office. I was waiting outside the door when another employee came in and started talking about watching streaming video. I thought that was an odd thing to say and asked him why he was talking about that, he said a plane had crashed into the World Trade Center.

I immediately thought this was a terrorist attack because it was such a clear day, and I had figured we were due for a big attack of some sort because terrorism was happening worldwide and we are the most powerful country in the the world who had pissed people off. Apparently this is just another way I think differently then most people, everybody else was completely surprised and had little idea why this happened. I soon found out telling people I was shocked but not surprised for these reasons really pissed people off.

We had no TV but in the repair room they did have a radio and as we know things deteriorated quickly. That did not prevent one customer from picking up his computer at 11 AM. Hour after hour I heard the fire departments using our road to get from Long Island into the city. The internet news services were frozen. It saw my first picture of what had happened 15 miles away from the BBC website at around 1PM. My dad was in the hospital for precautionary reasons so after work I visited him, ate dinner at a diner and finally got home. 12 hours after the fact I finally saw the infamous 2nd plane video that most people had probably seen live and dozens of times since.

Murphy's law was in full effect. As It turned we had just installed a major modification for a client the day before. Let's just say it was not one of my better professional moments, ie lots of bugs. While most people were processing the events I was dealing with one angry boss and his client and working a lot of overtime.

I knew I wanted to visit the site. History had always happened either before my time or far far away. While this was not the history I wanted it was just a train ride away. And unlike most I did not have the time to deal with it when it first happened. September was too soon, I would just be in the way of people who really needed to be there. If I waited too long the site would be cleaned up, the rubble gone. In late October I made my visit. Being that I do express my emotions differently I had not really cried since I was a young boy, but I did expect to burst into tears. It did not work out that way. Even though it was a cool windy day it still smelled but life was starting to go on. A wedding was going on at a church down the block, at the site girls were having their pictures taken with the policemen. This place was already becoming a tourist trap even though the ruins were still smoldering. I had been down to the WTC a number of times including a week and half before so I knew the area I but this time It was very different as discombobulation not sadness is what I felt.

For months on end you would be stopped for a funeral procession once or twice a day. I live under a flight path for Kennedy airport so I got over the sound of planes frightening me relatively quickly. I remember walking in Manhattan and thinking I had better get a good look at that building it might not be there for very long. The start of 2002 seemed to be a turning point in recovering from whatever PTSD symptoms I had, the attack was now last year. When a digital clock strikes 9:11 it still gives me the heebee jeebies sometimes.

My brother emerged from a subway a block or so away when the second plane hit. I know two firemen who were half a block away when one of towers collapsed. They all survived fine. I know one of the people profiled in the movie World Trade Center. He was one of the people who rescued somebody way down in the rubble.

The cliché rang true for the fall of 2001 in the New York area. It certainly was the worst of times, but it was also the best of times in the sense the there was unity I had never seen before and seems today like it came from an alternate universe to the America of 2016. There was an intensity to every moment.

Last edited by ASPartOfMe on 11 Sep 2016, 2:29 pm, edited 4 times in total.

I was in bed sleeping since it happened while I was still in bed because of different time zones. My dad wakes me up to "They are talking about planes crashing" and I got annoyed with his way of waking me up and I didn't care about planes crashing. I wasn't interested in hearing about it. I was oblivious to this was an attack and I didn't notice until I got to school and there it was again, TV in the choir room, the news on about it, the towers burning and them showing clips of the plans flying into them. I then learn in class this was all deliberate and kids get excited saying how World War III had started. I remember I get anxious and upset because of the war and the teacher kept saying there is no WWIII and my aide took me back to the resource room. I was on the computer all day in there and they also had the TV on in there about it and everyone was obsessing about this. I didn't understand why and I was already over it and heard enough because it was all repetitive. There was no school work for a few days because the teachers had all their students watch it on TV and listen to the newsanchors about it and to families who lost someone in it. My Culinary Art teacher was in Mexico when it happened so she was trapped in that county for a few weeks and she even had to sell a pair of her sandals for money. I think she lost some of her stuff because she needed to survive down there and that was really stressful to hear. My mom was in Billings, Montana when it happened and my mom saw the second plane crash into the second tower live and the newsanchor had a real reaction to it live. She was in a hotel room getting dressed and stuff when she saw it. My husband saw it live too, I didn't. I only saw clips of it and it wasn't live. They just showed it over and over.

I was in my apartment, just getting ready to head out to go to do research at the university. I happened to turn on the tv to catch the weather when I saw the news on the first plane hit. I called my father and told him the news. During the conversation, the second plane hit and I watched it live on tv. It stunned me for a bit to say the least. I watched the two towers fall down also. Arriving late to school, my research adviser acted like nothing had happened and wanted us graduate students to get back to work rather than to talk about it.

I think it was in that same month that a distant relative from America came over, and had bought me a snowglobe of New York City and it had the twin towers in it. It was strange afterwards everytime I looked at it. I'm not sure if I've still got it. I was 13.

On the day itself I had just been accepted into a different school and it was good news, so I wasn't sure what to feel. In general I hated that year, it was probably the strangest year of my life, unrelated to 9/11.

...I've just realised what you've said. Well, my post is unrelated but here it is.