9/11 20 years on where were you can you remember it happening

[TheCatsHaveEyes]

Just read an article about 9/11 cannot believe it will be 20 years since it happened next month. Still remember it like yesterday.
It really was my generation's JFK moment I think.
I was working at Fenwicks part time student. My friend came over to relive me so I could go on break and told me about a plane flying into one of the twin towers. I assumed she meant a light air craft so as I wandered into the staff room I was shocked to see the type of plane crashing into building and gasped as did everyone else already watching in the room. Only then did someone say that was a second plane.
After work me and all my family watched sky news on a loop it was horrendous those poor souls what they went through. The world seemed so terrifying suddenly.

I was playing croquet at the civil service college in Surrey. A more English scene would be hard to imagine. Someone from the course came out to tell us we needed to watch the news.

I was on a plane - so knew nothing about it until we landed... The captain had announced that London airspace was closed, which didn't ring any alarm bells (😁) and we ended up landing in Liverpool which was a bit of a pain, but what shocked me the most was the number of armed police at the airport staring down the passengers as we got off the airplane, this was really unusual and I could have counted on one hand the number of armed police I had ever seen in my short 20 years.....

I then rang my Mum to tell her (very early mobile days) and she was surprised that I had made it back to the UK...told me what had happened, but like previous posters, didn't grasp reality until seeing the pictures.

I was off school recovering from an operation. My Dad got a call from a colleague and switched on the TV just after the first plane was being reported - we watched as the second approached and it became clear that it wasn't a tragic accident.

Now I always think of an MNer that I came across a few years later, kateandthegirls, who lost her husband that day. I can't imagine how hard that must have been then and still now.

I was 13 and had had a half day at school. I walked into out house just before 2pm and my dad yelled at me to come look at the TV. I saw the second plane hit live.

I was at work. We had a lab that had TVs in it and people started gathering round them. The enormity of it didn't really hit me until much later.

I was having a driving lesson in London, and my driving instructor told me when he picked my up. After the lesson, I just sat and watched the TV news all day.

*me up. Edit button now. Now!

I was sitting on the floor playing with my toddler and baby and switched the TV on to catch the news. I saw the second plane hit and thought I'd put the wrong channel on and caught a disaster movie. When it dawned on me that it was real I remember going cold with.shock and turning it off before dd1 noticed. I had to phone my mum to find out what was going on.

There was a lovely MNetter who lost her DH that day. I hope the years since have been kind to her and her children.

I was in a remote area of Nepal with no television or English media. My Nepalese friends tried to explain but I didn't have enough Nepali or them English. I found out the world had changed when I went up to Kathmandu in mid October.

I was at work in the City in London. We were all watching it on the screens in the office and noone really knew what to do....news was filtering in about the Pentagon as well as the WTC and people were saying London would be the next target so we should leave the office, but noone wanted to get on public transport...people had family phoning them from around the UK telling them to get on a train out of London back to their hometowns to be safe, and everyone just kind of straggled out as the day went on. I had tickets for the theatre that night with a friend and we decided to still go...it was Chicago with Denise van Outen and Alison Moyet. The theatre was only about a quarter full and the atmosphere was very strange. Streets were deserted when we left.

Yes I remember clearly being at a friends house and her putting the tv on and it being on every channel. The shock and sadness.
These flashbulb memories where most of the population remember clearly where they were and who they were with are only on a few events - 9/11 and princess Diana’s death being the two most common ones.

I was at work. I was running an IT training session at the time the planes hit the Twin Towers, so was oblivious to what was going until it finished and I popped into a colleague's office on the way back to mine. Someone else came in and said in a shocked tone "there's a 4th plane!". The others in the office all looked shocked and saying things like "oh my God where?" and was standing in the doorway feeling very confused, and saying "there's a 4th plane doing what? What's going on?". My colleagues then told me what had happened. We spent much of the rest of the afternoon keeping an eye on the news online, I remember our Internet connection was running so slowly and could barely cope with the volume of traffic.

When I got home that evening I watched the news all evening, feeling a mix of horror, shock and disbelief. I went on holiday by plane to a European destination 2 days later. There was a real feeling of fear and extreme nervousness at the airport, security was extremely tight, and we weren't allowed any hand luggage other than one clear plastic bag containing money, keys, essential medication and tickets. Everything else that had been in our hand luggage, including mobile phones, had to be put into our hold luggage.

I was working in a kennels, and the afternoon spent in the kitchen was making the meals up for the dogs and cleaning and preparing for the next day. It was reported on the news on radio 1, which then went back to music. So I switched to radio 4 for ongoing coverage, the lad I was working with kept switching it back to radio 1. So I was only getting snippets. When I got home a few hours later I found my family all sat around the tv shell shocked having watched the second tower fall live on the news. It took a few days for the enormity of it to sink in. The world has changed so much since then. Having grown up in the north west with the IRA bombings in Manchester and Warrington, the shock of it being a terrorist attack wasn’t quite as much as for others I think, I don’t think I really understood the scale of it at first though and the implications for global politics/conflicts.

I remember the day, and how I heard the news very clearly. At the time I worked in contaminated land remediation, and I was sampling groundwater from boreholes in Taunton, ahead of the bus station redevelopment. I moved the car into a different field and heard what I thought was a film review on the radio, about a plane flying into a skyscraper. An hour later I moved to the next field and heard it again, which I thought was strange.

Remember, this was before smartphones, and not everyone even had mobiles. I went to a phone box to report in to my boss in Leeds, who filled me in on the news. He and the rest of my team in Leeds were huddled round a pc trying to stream what news they could.

9/11 was on a Tuesday I seem to remember. The previous Friday we’d submitted a tender bid for some specialist geological mapping on the Iran/Iraq border, with me as senior engineer. It would have been a career defining project for me, but we withdrew the bid before the work was awarded.

I was at work in a hospital a colleagues mum called and told her a plane had gone into a building in New York but it didn't seem that serious !! Things then escalated and everyone started talking about it and we watched it on the news. A doctor came into the office and said he had heard planes were heading for buildings all over America it was incredibly scary. I remember calling my mum on her mobile and she was having a cream tea in the countryside with my stepdad totally oblivious to the horror that was unfolding.

I was in my flat in Italy. The evening before I'd bought a video recorder and had gone to do a lesson, just after midday, leaving it recording a random channel to check I'd done it properly.
I did my class, got back, and turned my recorder on. I was momentarily so intent on checking the recording had worked (looking down at the lights etc rather than at the screen) that it took a few minutes to realise that the recording wasn't of a film. It was an Italian newsflash with the CNN footage showing "America under attack" on the red ticker tape at the bottom.
I don't think I moved from the TV for the next 4-5 days.
I remember the Uefa(?) or something similar football matches going ahead, and the players afterwards saying they shouldn't have.
And I remember the Friday- there was a two minute silence pretty much worldwide if I remember correctly. Upstairs the flat above me was having building work done and it was constant banging and drilling for months. That day, the one and only time ever, they stopped for the two minutes.

I was at work and my colleague opposite me got a phone call from his friend who still worked at the bank where my colleague used to work. Told him about both planes so we knew then it was a deliberate attack and not an accident.

The office manager allowed us to put the radio on in the office and at one stage I think we even turned the phones off and put the answering machine on. We just spend the afternoon sort of doing work but also listening to the pentagon being hit and wondering how many more targets there would be.

We just sat for the most part in bewildered silence. It was almost too much to take in, the sheer scale of the terror and the number of people affected.

I was working for Aon. Had been on the phone with a colleague from the New York office only 30 minutes before the plane hit. Unfortunately, Aon lost 180 staff members that day, including the person who I spoke to on the phone 😞

I was visiting a nursing home as part of my work. All the residents - even the ones with dementia were gathered round the TV watching in horror as it happened. I think that really shows the impact it had on everyone

Similarly to @lollipoprainbow, my Mum was working, then came home, had her tea, went swimming with her friend, then they went to the pub. It was only in the pub about 9pm they heard about it.
Seems hard to even imagine now in the days of 24 hour non stop news.

I remember watching it unfold on Babycenter as a poster realised her DH wasn't coming home. There were so many horrific moments of those few days as it was covered on the news but that is what sticks in my mind.

I was at work, my manager came back off her break and told us all to get the news up on our computers while she tried to find the remote for the telly in the rest room. We all watched in shock and couldn't believe what we were seeing. It was a couple of weeks before my wedding and I remember worrying that there would be a World War and DH would be called up before we got married (he was ex army so potentially could have been).

My dad told me about it when I was on my way home from school. My brother and I were 11 and 5, my dad doesn't usually pick us up, and we were walking on the other side of the road from normal.

He said he had some very sad news to tell us - and when he told us I was relieved because I thought he was going to tell me one of my grandparents was dead (they're still with us 20 years later!)

I didn't understand the enormity of it and 11yo me wondered what all the fuss was about. Of course, getting older it became clearer to me what a horrific event it was.

I was at school (6th form) came home and found my dm and some workmen watching what I thought at the time was a film until I turned the tv on and saw the devastation.
My friend at the time had a family member travelling from New York to another part of the country and counldnt get hold of them for hours.
Thankfully it wasnt their plane but I'll never forget my friends face when she didnt know.

I was at work and my fiancé rang me from work he was working at the Foreign Office at the time to tell me he would be home late. We were getting married on the 21st of September that year.

Then someone else who I worked with, whose he dad was on a Concorde doing a test flight and no one new where he was as all planes were diverted to the closest airport.