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Thread: My 9/11 Story

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    Titan in the Playground
     
    DrowGuy

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    Default My 9/11 Story

    Hello everyone. Happy Patriots Day. I'll tell you my story about September 11, 2001. When I was 16 years old I was at the school bus on my way to my childhood school. I was at the Brooklyn Bridge and my friends and I saw the planes crashing the Twin Towers. They asked me if they were making a movie but I told then I don't think they're making a movie I think it was real. But then it was a normal day after I went downstairs so many people, teachers, staff members, and students were at the main lobby and the teachers said we were under attack. My reaction was like wow, really? It was crazy. Then I went to the school bus on my way home and I got home about by 5:30 PM. I told my mom after what happen to the Twin Towers building and she saw it. That's my 9/11 story.
    It's time to get my Magikarp on!

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    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    I was in the UK, where I've lived most of my life. It was my first day in a new job - quality and compliance manager for a consumer products company - and I was really busy finding out how everything was supposed work, and how I could make it better.
    Early afternoon, someone came into my office and said something like "They've attacked the World Trade Centre!"
    "Who's 'they'?" I said.
    "Terrorists just flew a plane into the twin towers," they answered.

    To my shame, I recall that I made some flippant remark. I really hadn't understood what I'd just been told. I was wrapped up in my own problems, and didn't get it.

    It was only after I got home and saw the TV news that I realised just how big a deal the attacks had been. I was shocked. I can only imagine how it must have felt to be in the USA - let alone in New York City - at the time.
    I remember the surge of sympathy in those days after the attacks. One of the French newspapers ran a headline "We are all Americans now" - meaning we stand in solidarity.

    Thanks, Bartmanhomer, for sharing your story. It's important to remember that we can be brought together by adversity.

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    Titan in the Playground
     
    DrowGuy

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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    Quote Originally Posted by Altair_the_Vexed View Post
    I was in the UK, where I've lived most of my life. It was my first day in a new job - quality and compliance manager for a consumer products company - and I was really busy finding out how everything was supposed work, and how I could make it better.
    Early afternoon, someone came into my office and said something like "They've attacked the World Trade Centre!"
    "Who's 'they'?" I said.
    "Terrorists just flew a plane into the twin towers," they answered.

    To my shame, I recall that I made some flippant remark. I really hadn't understood what I'd just been told. I was wrapped up in my own problems, and didn't get it.

    It was only after I got home and saw the TV news that I realised just how big a deal the attacks had been. I was shocked. I can only imagine how it must have felt to be in the USA - let alone in New York City - at the time.
    I remember the surge of sympathy in those days after the attacks. One of the French newspapers ran a headline "We are all Americans now" - meaning we stand in solidarity.

    Thanks, Bartmanhomer, for sharing your story. It's important to remember that we can be brought together by adversity.
    You're welcome. I just thought I want to share in honor of Patriots Day.
    It's time to get my Magikarp on!

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    Sheriff in the Playground Administrator
     
    Roland St. Jude's Avatar

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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    Sheriff: Ok folks, I believe in you. Keep this non-political. Thanks.
    Forum Rules

    Sheriff Roland by Chris the Pontifex

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    Ettin in the Playground
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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    Ok, back then, I was working as a project manager in a major-league advertisement company.

    Think of the usual setup, old industrial building converted to slick office spaces, lots of glass, the kind of expensive Bauhaus-style office furniture that signals "we made it" all around.

    Actually, 9/11 was the date for a major soccer match by the local champion, so naturally, we plastered out office space with monitors in anticipation to watch the match after work and drink/f**k/d**g our brains out after office.

    I was having a telco with my counterpart at the customer side, a manager I had a pretty good professional report going on, when a colleague frantically ran thru the whole office, switching on the maybe 16 Flatscreens we positioned and went for the public news channel.

    After some silence, maybe the whole room of mostly bright people said at once: "There are gonna be nukes!".

    All the while, I still had my headset on because of the telco, my counterpart was completely shocked. I mean, we only ever treated on a professional level, now we talked about what we saw, what we felt, out fears....

    After office hours, I got onto the train and went to visit her. 9/11, this is how I met my first (ex) wife.

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    Ogre in the Playground
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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    I was a few weeks into my freshman year at college. Specifically, I was in my biology lecture class when it happened. I didn't know until I came home, turned on the TV, and saw that it was on every channel. The full significance of what it meant didn't sink in for me until much later in the day.
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    Ogre in the Playground
     
    Flumph

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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    I had to wake up early.
    I had a 6:50am Calculus class the next county over on a drive with notorious morning rush hour traffic.
    So I had gotten into the habit of waking up around 4:55 catch the first 15 min of the BBC world news at 5 am then shower (no shave I had a beard which was weird back then) and out the door by 5:45 at the latest....

    So the first plane had just hit when I sat down with my cornflakes and turned the tv on. Watched the second plane hit. The TV was still talking like it was an accident for a couple minutes until they clued in it was both towers burning. I ws like...huh...so it finally happened. I had known something was likely for years. But this was a higher order of magnitude than I expected.

    I put in a couple msgs (an old school private msg board kinda like a forum/chatroom cross over from the late 80's that was still ticking along) to people I knew who worked for the Port Authority and spent part of their work week in the Trade Center most weeks. Woke up my parents had to convince them that the NYC was under attack. Went into school. Was my normal 7th person in the parking lot (yeah the really early people were all regulars). Did my normal reading of books etc before class. By the time class started learned the towers had come down. That's when I go the same feeling I had as a child watching tanks roll into the Kremlin....that the world had changed and what the future brought was in flux, unknowable. I understood this one better than the first but was getting a bit nervous.

    Next class was "canceled due to current events" as it said on the board...got word that my friends were ok. Last class people bombarded me with questions. Why? because I was the news junkie who had ... discussed the existence the whole field as things people should pay attention to...sudden I was seen as an instant expert, which I was not. Informed yes, I knew most of world's hotspots and terrorists involved in various conflicts and why, but no expert. Discussed the history of Afghanistan up to the assassination of the Lion of Panjir (leader of the northern alliance) only a couple days before....Felt like a fraud...I was a 19year old and people were acting like I knew something...I just knew how little I knew.

    Went to work, the TV was left on and we all checked in with it every few min....only time that happened there...watching the falling number of the presumed dead, worked at dealing with the couple of people in the office who were due to fly back from Europe in the next couple days. And started to fear the mania gripping the country I could see on TV.

    I went home. I had a bunch of calls from HS friends....I had been known for my interest in international relations, bomb making, terrorism etc. I tried to tell them that they were safer from terrorism that that night than they had been in the morning. And I meant it. Many many more people were taking it seriously now. But as I listened to their fears I became scared. . . of them, of the reaction. Smart, thoughtful people now desperate to lash out. I've always been nervous around crowds, they have always felt alien to me. But this was on different scale.

    I never felt more distanced from this nation I was born in than that night.


    Probably not how most people remember that day....or why it caused fear and dread...but it was my experience of it.
    Last edited by sktarq; 2020-09-11 at 10:37 PM.

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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    I had just finished back to back to back all nighters for some project at work I don't remember. I got back home at about 2AM and immediately crashed hard. I woke up at some point mid-afternoon and turned on the tv to check the weather and saw the news reports. I distinctly remember thinking "About time somebody took another shot at us" before turning off the tv, getting a snack and going back to bed, which was probably the most rational thing to do given my exhaustion.

    When I woke up and tuned in again, a lot of the earlier hysteria was gone. At least, I don't remember newscasters going on about invisible invasion fleets approaching the coast. The lust for bloody vengeance that took its place was scarier.

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    J-H's Avatar

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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    It was my junior year at college, living in the dorms. I don't remember if I got a call or if someone told us or what...my first class that day was later in the day. I went to one class (Russian), {Scrubbed} Classes were cancelled shortly after for the rest of the day. I did the hike to my car (parking 20-30 minutes away) to go fill up the tank in case I needed to head home or evacuate on short notice. Spent a lot of time on a chat program and some forums tracking status. I don't think we had a TV in our dorm room... or if we did, it was the usual cycle of "here's what we know, we don't know anything new, but here's what we know."

    For the next couple of weeks we were ALL braced for follow-ups. Who attacks just once? Keep in mind, 9/11 was launched just a couple of days after{Scrubbed} so it looked like a coordinated play. There may have been other stuff going on in the world also, don't recall. Looking at more recent attacks, {Scrubbed} would have been pretty devastating as a 1-2-3 set of punches, but nothing happened. {Scrubbed} Glad, but surprised. It's hard to tell what information we had was accurate or not, as far as{Scrubbed}vs "no they didn't" and who did or did not "lose" NBC inventory in the '90s. All we got were some envelopes of anthrax

    I got the chance to visit the 9/11 museum in NYC about 3 years ago. One of the very first sections as you walk in is a set of audio playbacks of people who were in different parts of the world and how they heard about it. It's a heavy experience. I wouldn't bring a kid there, but it's absolutely worth going as an adult. It's a tomb as well as a museum. One of the walls of the museum is a big retaining wall (you're underground), and some of the remains of the victims are behind the wall.

    {Scrubbed}
    Last edited by jdizzlean; 2020-09-13 at 03:39 AM. Reason: clean up

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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    For my generation, it was Challenger. I wonder what the next generation will have.

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    CheesePirate's Avatar

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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    I was at work.

    I don't remember exactly how we heard about it, it might have been from someone on IRC (some of us sneakily had clients running on our computers), or it might have been one of my coworkers checking the news online during a short break.

    I do remember sitting in front of a monitor with everyone else in the animation department (and some of the programmers), staring in disbelief at the footage of the hijacked planes and the towers collapsing. I remember being worried sick about my sister and her family who were in the US at the time because of work, not too far from NYC. I remember being afraid of what might happen next.

    Obviously we didn't get any work done that afternoon. In the following days/weeks I remember getting into fierce arguments with the people in marketing and top brass who wanted us to produce a bunch of jingoistic animations, something I and other animators found utterly repugnant; both because it was a blatant attempt at profiting from that dreadful event in which so many people died and because we didn't want any part in promoting jingoism.

    The company eventually closed down the animation department, because the owners felt we weren't making them enough money. My sister and her family returned safely to Norway.

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    Ogre in the Playground
     
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    Default Re: My 9/11 Story

    I was in the US Navy. My ship was set to deploy September 13, so we had our full loadout of weapons. I walked into my stateroom and saw several other junior officers standing around the TV. I can't remember how much had happened at that point. I just remember standing there, watching the TV and trying to figure out what was happening.

    Not long after, we got orders to pull out. We spent the next 3 days floating off the coast of NY. Our external communications were cut off, so I couldn't even tell my family what I was doing. But it turns out I didn't have to. When our email came back up, I had an email from my then-girlfriend asking how I liked New York. I wrote back to ask how she knew, since were weren't allowed to tell anyone what we were doing. "It was on CNN. They named your ship."

    A few days later, we deployed.

    Quote Originally Posted by Rogar Demonblud View Post
    For my generation, it was Challenger. I wonder what the next generation will have.
    I was in 4th grade. I was obsessed with space and dreamed of being an astronaut. (That dream is what led me to think of joining the Navy.) I thought that mission was so cool because there was a teacher on-board. (I am the child of two teachers.)

    Our principal came over the intercom and announced the Challenger had exploded on lift-off. The teacher turned on the TV and we watched the news broadcast for I don't know how long.
    Hello. My name is Inigo Montoya. You killed my father. Prepare to die.

    Proud member of the "I Love Anyway" Club

    Thank you, Ceika, so much for the avatar!

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