Where were you when 9/11 happened

[Floopyfloop]

I know this topic has been done many times before but this 9/11 seems to have really made me think about it more.

I was in an interview for an internal job change and the interviews were being held at a Marriott hotel. It would have been an amazing job to get. I got through the first round in the morning and rang my now husband to tell him I was through to the afternoon interviews on a payphone. He sounded really unnerved and told me that something awful had happened in NY and to see if I could watch the news somewhere. I asked them in reception if they had a telly. A crowd gathered and watched in stunned silence. Everyone thought it was an accident but as the second plane hit, everyone was horrified when we realised it was deliberate.

I was called into the interview about 5 minutes after the second tower was hit and I sat there white as a sheet, trying to keep it together. The interviewer asked if I was ok and I explained what had happened. She said that her brother worked in lower Manhattan and said she needed to leave. I really hope her brother was ok. After that all the interviews were cancelled for the day and we sat in the hotel bar watching it unfold.
There was a Marriott in the WTC complex so the staff were worried about their colleagues.

I had visited the WTC myself in the April of 2001 and I went to the Top of the World Observatories In the South tower.

Agree @memote

At work. Someone had finished early and they rang in to tell us what was happening. We all sat around watching the BBC news website in disbelief.

At work. Someone had finished early and they rang in to tell us what was happening. We all sat around watching the BBC news website in disbelief.

yep that ambulance trip 22 years ago is deffo the reason the nhs is on its knees

😆

I was on a strawberry picking farm in Faversham. We had a tv room and we were all crowded in there trying to understand what is going on.

I had been in the U.K. only since April that year. It was a bit scary being so far away from home.

No one actually cares where you were

You do hence why you are commenting on this thread 🤷🏻‍♀️

Pregnant with my fist son buying a gift for my friend's birthday 'Angels gift shop' for anyone who lives in Chapel Allerton in Leeds. The man behind the counter had a little counter-top TV and we stood watching the towers fall. One of those really clear memories.

At work trying to keep up on dial up internet

At work. My boss rang up and said "put the tv on".

Until a few months before I'd worked for a company that had its HQ in the Twin Towers. People I knew died that day but fortunately most of those I knew well survived for various reasons. It was a hellish day.

Utter rubbish, I've just read all these responses as it was such a horrific day. No one over about 20 will forget how utterly devastating it was and these 4 pages just show that.

I was in a high street on holiday looking at a telly in a shop also thinking it was a film. Rushed back to our accommodation and spent the whole day and night watching the coverage. It happened at 2pm BST.

I had woken up after a short post night shift sleep. Thought it was a film at first then realised in horror it was real. Could not believe it when the towers fell, had been to the observation deck on a previous trip.

In a small Canadian town not far from the Buffalo New York Border sat in advanced economics. I was in grade 10. The teacher wheeled in a TV from the AV Media room and we watched the it on CNN just after tower 2 was hit. We were sent home at 10.30. Couldn't get through to our parents as cell signals were blocked for a time. Only a couple of us had phones in those days, so we took turns trying to call home.

Several families were stranded in a mid size local airport. My parents hosted a family for 3 days.

It was terrifying.

I was in year 8 so was at school and didn't see or hear anything about it until getting home about 4pm and seeing the news on TV.

I went to wake my mum who'd been working night shifts and told her that planes had flown into the World Trade Centers but she didn't believe me and said I must be mistaken. She said later she thought I'd been watching a film.

I remember coverage being on every channel, adults being very tense and talk of WW3, and my mum comforting me saying it would be a very different war to the previous world wars and to not worry (when she was clearly very worried.)

I'm sure noone cares about the majority of the shit you say either, but it doesn't seem to stop you!

At work in a newsroom. I’d done a really early shift and was just getting ready to go home when the first plane hit. We had TV screens everywhere so we were already watching when the second one hit. People immediately started talking about Bin Laden.
A colleague whose sister lived right by the WTC was desperately trying to get through to her and failing. She went home in tears.
Our New York offices were seen as a major target and were evacuated, so we just kept on working until we were eventually able to hand over to newly awake colleagues in Asia.
Everyone was completely stunned and operating on a weird sort of autopilot.
It still feels very recent to me - I’m always astonished when I meet adults who weren’t born when it happened or who were too young to remember it.

At a friends house, we went to each others house every Tuesday before we went swimming with our dc. Her little boy was about 4, and dd2 was coming up 2. I was pregnant with ds.

We'd finished lunch and her ds was watching to in the room next room. He came through and said "when are the Thunderbirds coming?" So she went to look and called me through, just as the second plane hit.

Getting the bus home there were loads of high school pupils on there. They were so quiet and worried compared to every other week. Radio1 was playing only sad music.

And I remember on Mumsnet Kateandthegirls who lost her husband that day.

I was working in a call centre in a job I hated. I was chatting to someone and they were telling me something had happened. When I came off the phone lots of colleagues were talking about it. The boss of the company told us it was not our concern and to not be distracted from our work. What a cunt.

I was on annual leave, and had a friend in who was converting my garage into a room. School phoned to ask me to pick up my daughter from school as she was unwell. Came back in, settled her on the couch and turned on tv for her. It happened to be on Sky news and I watched from just when the first tower came down. My friends were in Disney land and we're told over annoy all visitors to return to their hotels. USA was under attack.

I was working for a financial services organisation and we had tv screens every where. I remember it all flashing up when the first tower was hit and everyone just stopped what they were doing to watch. People started drifting back to desks when the second one hit and then our HR kicked off our DR process as the markets went a bit mental

I was living in Central Asia. We tuned into the fuzzy local news late evening before we went to bed, and saw the first tower.
We sat there stunned, not understanding the commentary.

Then they switched to live streaming CNN and we sat and watched the second tower.

Our team had a number of Americans. We didn't know if we should phone them and wake them up or leave it until morning. It was a terrible decision to have to make actually, because we knew they would struggle to get through to the USA on phones. Internet was slow and dial up. But we also knew they would want to know.

(as it turns out friends and family in US phoned them and woke them up to tell them they were OK)

But then the next day began the crisis of Americans being pulled out of Central Asia at short notice and people having to pack and leave at a few days notice.

I had recently finished working on a burns unit so was sick at the thought of what people trapped in the towers would have experienced. Remember thinking I might I jumped even though I am terrified of heights.

Bloody hell. I was year 8 and we only found out when we got home.

That’s a false memory of seeing the first tower hit on tv I’m afraid. There was no live broadcast of the first tower being hit - there was no reason to be showing live footage of the towers at that point, no one knew what was coming. The second tower being hit was shown live as all the news crews had scrambled by that point.

It’s a really common thing for people to think they saw, but it never happened.

I was at work, I had a temp job in an office on my uni holidays. The one guy in the department with the internet on his computer told us what was happening. So I didn't see the coverage in real time but my flatmate and I watched the TV all evening in horror.

I was at work and Steve Wright announced it on the radio. I just assumed it was a light aircraft that had hit the building and broken up. I went out to the waiting room and stood in horror watching replay after replay on the TV. All the patients in the waiting room were in shock. A gentleman came in sat down and jokingly asked what disaster movie was on since he didn’t recognise it.
When I got home DH and I sat and watched the newsfeed through the night. A friend has photos from the top of the towers taken 5 days before it happened.
It was the same when the tsunami hit in south east Asia. I woke up to bf my 3mnth old DS at 3am. DH used to change him then make us both a cup of tea. We would then turn on the TV and watch a documentary. I turned on the TV and the tv stations were just picking it all up. Again we spent most of the day watching the situation unfold. We had friends and family in the area so it was a stressful time. DH’s cousin had a bar on the beach in Phuket, fortunately they were closed on the Boxing Day and were celebrating Christmas at home in the hills. The friends were by the beach as the sea started to recede, they knew it wasn’t right and just ran inland and uphill.